Over the years I have managed to convince myself that Osama bin Laden must be dead. An ailing old man having insufficient kidney function could not have survived the perils of frequent traveling and that too by avoiding security forces now present at every nook and corner of my homeland Pakistan. I am somehow bewildered to know that he was still alive and living in the suburbs of PMA Kakul in Abbotabad for the last many years, an institution visited by the Army Chief of Pakistan maintaining seventh largest army of the world and other Military and Intelligence high ups frequently. We should not blame our security forces for an Intelligence failure or feel uncomfortable, Americans too had an operational Air Base in the suburbs near Ghazi-Tarbela.
Let’s see what happens next. To me a lot of questions still remain. What if Americans could have captured him alive and interrogated him, very similar to the Saddam Hussein episode in which the whole fiasco was brought to a logical conclusion. But I am afraid that doing so would have invited a lot of troubles for the Obama Administration which could have been blackmailed to release Osama by Alqaeda giving a threat of nuclear attack in Europe or by trading him at the cost of lives of hostages taken from a hijacked plane. Drowning of his dead body into sea has left many unsatiated. To me he should have been buried in Saudi Arabia in an entirely Islamic way. We as Muslims believe in graves disappearing with the sands of times.
(The picture on the left is a file photo from Reuters. The center image was sent in by a number of readers as an email attachment--it's initial provenance is unknown. The image on the right is a blend of the two others we made here at msnbc.com.)
Rumors have already started to emerge. If you look at the pictures pasted above, all it seems is an amateur Photoshop job. Details can be found at msnbc photoblog.
(as released by Pentagon)
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