There are many ways of relating Osama bin Laden's final fate. We have hardly seen the end of the story, especially when Western “experts” charge that a breach of international law has been committed by the United States (Ove Bring in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, David Allen Green in the New Statesman). So, the enforcement agent must put his own life and that of his team-mates at risk in order to ensure the humane treatment of one who has organized suicide bombings of thousands of people? Sure. Mind you, they did not even ask for his ID.
In my view, it is not the HR principles that are stupid. In fairness, while Bring sees this as a serious matter, Green says he will hardly lose any sleep over it. Then again, many in the Muslim world think like the Swede, which leads them to call for reprisals against the US.
The obligation to provide bin Laden with a fair trial must be laid at Pakistan's door. The US took its own measures when its ally failed to do what it could and should have done.
There is a good old rule of foreign policy that says if you don't effectively control your own territory, others will – or at least they will take advantage of you. Territorial control is a military task. Pakistan, however, has a military that is busy with other matters, domestic politics above all. The only border they guard jealously is that with India. So it was apparently easy for the US Navy Seals team to swoop down from Afghanistan in their helicopters and snatch bin Laden where he was hidden in northern Pakistan, next to a Military Academy. The hue and cry afterwards about the transgression on Pakistan's sovereignty was predictable. However, blaming others for failing to respect an unguarded border is hard to take seriously, even more so considering the circumstances.
Now the dispute is on concerning who's to blame for bin Laden's eight-year residence in the area where he was found. We need not ponder long to guess that someone must have known. Of course, within the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence there are many different sections, and as in any large political organization sections often become factions with aims of their own, some corresponding to movements in the subterranean landscape of Pakistani politics. One of the ISI sections was previously in charge of training mujahedin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, among them the young Osama. No one knows for sure when they stopped doing that after the Soviets bowed out in 1988. I read somewhere recently that turning a blind eye to inconvenient facts is said to be a necessity in Pakistan's political culture. That is a believable statement.
