THE RAID.........

Three years after killing Osama, America is still haunted by Pakistan. So am I.By NAHAL TOOSI  May 04, 2014

The morning the news broke that the United States had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, three years ago this weekend, I was pursuing a very different kind of storyMy Pakistani colleagues and I were traveling to Chakwal, an area about 90 minutes south of Islamabad, to visit a school with chronically absent teachers for an article about Pakistan’s dilapidated education system. It was the type of idea my editors usually rolled their eyes at — not enough blood and intrigue — but they’d relented this time because nothing else was going on.

We never reached the school. Instead, we made a U-turn and returned to Islamabad before being dispatched to Abbottabad, where The Story, the one reporters across the region kept renewing their Pakistani visas for, was finally unfolding. We spent days roaming outside the al Qaeda chief’s compound, interviewing neighbors, dodging checkpoints and trying to stay ahead of Pakistani intelligence agents.

Yet, despite our best efforts, security officials never let us inside Bin Laden’s house. Key details about what had happened there came instead out of Washington, often through unnamed sources. And after what seemed to be an initial burst of credulity, many Pakistanis quickly latched on to conspiracy theories about what happened, and their amazement at the notion that the terrorist leader had lived among them morphed into anger over the U.S. intrusion on their soil.
It’s all just a drama—Osama never existed, some told us. “This is all so barack obama can get reelected,” one man said. Then, there was this gem: “Osama had a body double, and that’s who the U.S. killed.”

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