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The Lessons of Abbottabad

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
June 27, 2011

Bruce Riedel, a former Obama administration adviser and one of the country’s foremost experts on counterterrorism, explains today in Tablet Magazine what we should take away from the mounting evidence that Pakistan’s military intelligence knew, to some degree, that Osama Bin Laden had been hiding for five years in its country’s equivalent of West Point. Pakistan can’t be trusted, but nor should its civilian government be completely dismissed; the United States and its allies should focus on sanctioning individuals, both terrorists and their enablers among the Pakistani military’s high-ranking officer corps; and the U.S. needs a long-term presence in Afghanistan, not so much for that country’s sake as to provide a base to continue the war against Al Qaeda, whose prime haven is no longer the country the U.S. invaded in 2001 but the one next-door that since 2001 has received billions of U.S. dollars.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.