Pakistan's Intelligence Service At Fault For Not Knowing Bin Laden Was Living There?

Now, I'm no 'fan' of Pakistan as either a friend of ours or supportive of us. Neither have I any illusions about their relative capability or desire to fight terrorism. Having said that, I think it may be unfair to judge so quickly and so insistently that Pakistan's intelligence service knew Bin Laden was living where we found him.

Time seems to have erased our national memory of how we blew the opportunity and need to find, keep an eye on and/or root out terrorists among us prior to 9/11. We've heard many stories about how our own intelligence services missed some pretty obvious things about the terrorists who killed those 3,000 Americans. In fact, we knew Bin Laden wanted to do something like what he did and we knew the approximate timing. It was an imminent threat right here in our own country and we still couldn't see and/or understand what was going on under OUR very noses.

I understand that the comparison between Bin Laden and the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks makes for significant differences because without Bin Laden those attacks probably wouldn't have happened. Nevertheless, one would have to consider people actually here who are preparing to carry out actual attacks are at least as serious a threat as some dude holed up in Afghaistan in terms of immediate danger and imminent threat to our country.

Those terrorists came here and started their planning while Clinton was still in office so two presidents' administrations carry blame for not finding those guys. Even considering the sorry shape our intelligence services were in under Clinton, they still should have been more competent then than the Pakistani intelligence services today.

Yes, it's possible that the Pakistani intelligence services knew where Bin Laden was because of the likelihood of corruption in that country as well as the liklihood that there are many people in their intelligence services who consider us a much bigger threat to Pakistan than is al Qaeda. Nevertheless, we shouldn't be so quick to judge their incompetence when there's ample evidence to suggest that even a country like ours can miss the boat on such things.