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Pakistan's reaction to the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden muted by concerns over jobs and security
There were no celebrations. And there was no mourning. It didn't occur to anyone to make an Obama effigy; no American flags were burnt. There were no heated debates about whether Osama was a martyr or not. The buses that were set ablaze in Karachi had nothing to do with the high drama in Abbotabad. The crowd in front of Karachi Press Club was a group of private bank employees wanting their jobs back. The little group at the gates of the electricity company offices was demanding nothing more than some good, clean electricity.
A hunger strike camp with young men's posters was part of a campaign to recover young men who have nothing at to do with al-Qaida.
In fact, the reaction to the killing of Bin Laden was so subdued that a colleague noted that there weren't even any text messages in circulation with conspiracy theories and inevitable jokes about Osama's wives.
Pakistanis are not in denial. Just busy. They are busy fighting a hundred little battles that don't involve US Navy Seals or helicopter crashes or Arab tycoons. These battles are as vicious as any that you have seen in the last 10 years but they don't make good TV. How do you create high drama out of millions of industrial labourers being laid off because there is no electricity? How do you sex up the banal fact that every tenth child in the world who never sees the inside of a schoolroom is a Pakistani child?
So it fell to our TV pundits to prove that we were also part of this global soap opera. They raged against yet another invasion of our much-molested sovereignty. They demanded transparency from America. They wanted footage. How many hours of rolling news you can spin out of a single, bullet-riddled mugshot?
In the real world an educationist and chronic optimist tried to fantasise. "So the party is over," he enthused. "Americans will go home. Our boys will ask their jihadi boys to pack up, surely?"
Someone reminded him. "Have you been to a party lately, sir? Nobody goes home."
Pakistan's security establishment, of course, went into a sulky silence, and wasn't around to reassure us. Were they protecting Osama bin Laden? Or were they so hopelessly inefficient that they couldn't track the world's most recognisable face when he was camped out practically at the edge of the Pakistan army's most famous parade ground? As they are answerable only to their mistrusting partners and permanent paymasters in Washington, they didn't feel like obliging us with any information.
But anyone who has lived through Pakistan's three military dictatorships sponsored by Washington can tell you there is no need to be such a reductionist. Why can't Pakistan's security establishment do both? Why can't they shelter him and then forget about the fact that they were sheltering him? Or why can't they shelter him and then shop him at a later stage?
Pakistan's army is often accused, mostly by their best friends in Washington, of double-dealing and fighting on both sides of this war. In its long role as rent-an-army to the US, it has been accused of becoming a mafia, a secretive clan and a corporation, all at the same time. But what does it feel like to live under this bloody delusion? It's like watching a person whose one hand is hacking away at his other hand. There is blood, there are cries of pain, and there is the obvious sound of one hand hacking away at the other. The person keeps looking around trying to figure out, who is doing this to me? Military operations and house-to-house searches to look for the hidden hand end up where they started.
On Tuesday afternoon an official from the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence agency) did come up with a frank but not very reassuring explanation about that house in Abbottabad. It was embarrassing, he told the BBC World Service. And then went on to reminisce about their past victories, duly acknowledged and celebrated by their Washington counterparts. "We are good but not gods," he said. What he really should have said is that we are gods, but not good.