The fallout from Mr bin Laden's death in South Asia is only just beginning

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WOKEN by the deafening thump of rotor blades, Haji Bashir Khan crept onto his roof and watched, under a warm and moonless sky, as American special forces stormed his neighbour’s compound. “Yes, we were scared—we don’t have terrorism here,” says the restaurateur. He heard shooting and screams, then felt an explosion as a grounded helicopter was destroyed. The blast broke his bedroom window and strewed blackened bits of the chopper over a nearby wheat field.

Mr Khan and others in Abbottabad, a garrison town north of Islamabad, say the raid that killed Osama bin Laden lasted for 40 minutes and Pakistani soldiers turned up only after the Americans had departed. That delay, even though three army regiments are camped on a base just a few minutes’ stroll away, and the ease with which helicopters swooped in from Afghanistan, suggest some limited Pakistani co-operation. The government, braced for public anger or revenge attacks by jihadis, al-Qaeda or otherwise, says grimly that it was caught unawares by the raid (though it also claims, somewhat confusingly, to have given some intelligence help beforehand).

Much harder to swallow are its claims that Pakistan’s blundering spies had no idea that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living, probably for years, not in a remote cave on the Afghan frontier but cradled in the arms of retired and serving generals in the pleasant, hillside town. It prefers to plead incompetence, since it would be far more painful to admit the alternative: that Pakistan's secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), or rogue elements within it, had long harboured Mr bin Laden and that Pakistan’s leaders only acquiesced in his killing, if at all, moments before the Navy Seals did the job.

Pakistani complicity is the likelier explanation. Mr bin Laden might well have had the gall to risk hiding in plain sight by the military cantonment in Abbottabad, where residents say they regularly submit to identity checks and police visits at home. Yet his prolonged stay at a specially built, high-walled compound, with many of his family flocking in from Yemen, required a network of help. That he had relatively few guards on the spot also suggests he trusted others for security. So it is unsurprising that, to the growing fury of Pakistani spies, many informed observers conclude he must have had help from the ISI.

Either way Pakistan, and especially the ISI, now looks deeply humiliated. India’s hawks crow that their bitter rival can never be trusted; noisier American congressmen want to slash the $3 billion in military and civilian aid that America sends to Pakistan. President Asif Zardari and other civilian leaders have floundered in their response. Relations with America that were already cool, especially between spy agencies, have turned icy as criticism of the ISI grows.

Spooked, the Pakistanis are already warning the Americans not to consider any more such raids. But it is clearly a tempting prospect. An obvious next target would be Mullah Omar, the ageing Afghan Taliban leader, whom the ISI is also accused of protecting. American agents snooping in Pakistan’s cities in the past year may have turned up other useful leads but chosen not to act until Mr bin Laden had been dealt with. Some conspiracy theorists even fret that the Americans could go after Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Usually smooth-speaking ISI men have been giving garbled accounts of what Pakistan was up to. More telling is the gobsmacked silence of their boss, General Ashfaq Kayani, the powerful army chief who had long denied that Mr bin Laden was hidden in Pakistan. On April 23rd he had brushed away American grumbles that too little was being done to fight terrorists, saying blithely they would soon be beaten and “we in Pakistan's army are fully aware of the internal and external threat to our country”. All the more galling for him, he said these words at Abbottabad’s military academy, within waving distance of the al-Qaeda leader’s safe-house.

The general may take some more knocks. Several foreign allies, such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, speaking on May 3rd, have called for support to Pakistan’s civilian leaders to continue, while saying that its military chiefs must answer tough questions about their spies. Yet any Western pressure will be calibrated with the civil war next door in Afghanistan in mind.

It is unclear how much will change there after the beheading of al-Qaeda. Optimists see glimmers, if for example the Americans at last push Pakistan to start a long-postponed campaign against the Haqqani network, which attacks Western forces in east Afghanistan from Pakistani bases. Al-Qaeda itself may be written off as irrelevant in Afghanistan, where intelligence folk say its fighters number fewer than 100. And if the more powerful Taliban accept that Mr bin Laden is dead, it may feel released from a Pashtunwali honour code about protecting guests and so disavow ties with al-Qaeda. A Western demand for them to do so has been the biggest block to planned peace talks. The Taliban may be spurred to act, fearing that whatever support it gets from inside Pakistan is in jeopardy.

But it is not clear that the Taliban will grow any more amenable just yet, and few observers think talks would get far given the many groups that would have to be involved. The Taliban's leaders will watch to see whether Mr bin Laden’s death softens Westerners’ already flagging will to fight on in Afghanistan, and whether plans to get many troops out in the next three years are hardened up—which would in turn weaken Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. The fallout from Mr bin Laden's death in South Asia is only just beginning.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/05/pakistan_and_afghanistan_after_bin_laden

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Mr. bin Laden?

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Mr. bin Laden?

It's the Economist. Always polite. lol.