Regardless of this one death the slaughter in Pakistan by bomb, bullet, cannon and drone will carry on
As news of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden's death reverberates in Pakistan, embassies here are shutting down, hotels are ramping up security, restaurants are reporting cancelled reservations and public gatherings like plays, concerts and lectures, are being postponed. The feeling in Lahore is familiar: it is like the dread that lingers over the city in the days after it has suffered a massive terrorist attack.
This time, though, the attack has not yet happened, and the dread spans the entire country. Pakistanis know they may pay a blood price for Bin Laden's killing. A purported mirror has been broken. Bad luck is to be expected.
Yet as I speak to friends and visit the market there is resignation , as well. After a decade of slaughter many here feel that terrorists are already striking Pakistan as hard as they can, and moreover that al-Qaida is no longer as powerful as other militant groups. The most common sentiment I hear is that nothing much will change.
That depends, of course, on how the US responds. Barack Obama noted in his speech that "counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding." But he also said that "a small team of Americans carried out the operation" itself. Between these two assertions is a gap open to a horde of questions.
For Bin Laden was not killed in the tribal areas near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He was killed in Abbottabad, a place I last visited a few years ago. In my childhood, Abbottabad was known as a pleasant hill station, a rest stop not far from Islamabad along the fabled Silk Road that winds its way to China through the mighty Karakoram and Himalaya mountains. Rampant population growth and climate change have seen its desirability as a tourist destination decline.
But while well-off Pakistani tourists no longer flock to Abbottabad as they once did, it remains famous in the country for its proximity to the Pakistan Military Academy, located just a few kilometers away. Hunting down a wanted terrorist in Abbottabad is, in American or British terms, like hunting him down near West Point or Sandhurst.
So a debate is raging in Pakistan over what really happened. Conspiracy theories abound. Some say that Pakistani intelligence agencies uncovered Bin Laden but wanted the US to take responsibility for his killing in order to blunt a possible backlash against Pakistan. Others argue that it is inconceivable that US helicopters could have penetrated so deeply into Pakistani airspace without being detected by the Pakistan army and air force (in the past, US helicopter incursions near the Afghanistan border have been turned back with warning shots), and therefore that the operation must have been jointly authorised.
But there are other, truly frightening theories, such as that even in a town with as dense a military presence as Abbottabad, Bin Laden managed to elude Pakistani security forces, suggesting a remarkable degree of incompetence. More terrifying still would be if there were official complicity in harbouring him, putting Pakistan on a collision course with the US. Pakistanis must hope that neither of these is true.
Because Pakistan is suffering badly. Crowds are justifiably celebrating Bin Laden's death in downtown Manhattan, where a decade ago al-Qaida terrorists infamously massacred nearly 3,000 people.
Less well known is the statistic that since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed nearly five times that number of people in Pakistan. The annual number of Pakistani fatalities from terrorism has surged from fewer than than 200 in 2003 to almost 1,000 in 2006, to more than 3,000 in 2009. In all, since 2001 more than 30,000 have died here in terror and counterterror violence; slain by bombs, bullets, cannons and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24-7-365. The battlefield has been displaced. And in Pakistan it is much more bloody.
If Osama Bin Laden's death means that the war in south and central Asia can now begin to end, that America can begin to withdraw its forces from the region, and that Pakistan and Afghanistan can somehow rediscover peace, then one day there may be celebrations here as well.
In the meantime American, Pakistani, Afghan, and terrorist commanders will go on conducting their operations, the slaughter will continue, and human beings – all equal, all equal – will keep dying, their deaths mostly invisible to the outside world but at a rate evoking a line of aircraft stretching off into the distance, bearing down upon tower after tower after tower. Bin Laden is dead. But many Pakistanis sense the impending arrival of yet another murderous plane, headed their way.