“The passage of a year might have dulled the pain,” said Momin Iftikhar in The Nation (Pakistan), but “the anger and bitter feelings continue to rankle.” When U.S. Navy SEALs violated Pakistani territory to swoop in on a compound in Abbottabad and kill Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s “sense of pride and patriotism” took a crushing blow. It was the second time in a matter of months that the U.S. had “walked roughshod” over Pakistani sovereignty. In January 2011, CIA contractor Raymond Davis murdered two people on the streets of Lahore, and he was “just one among a large contingent of U.S. intelligence operators who had, in an unauthorized and surreptitious manner, saturated the Pakistani landscape to run clandestine spy networks.” Nor was the bin Laden raid the last such event. Last November, U.S. forces launched an “inexplicable” attack on a Pakistani outpost, killing 24 soldiers. No wonder anti-Americanism is now “widespread and entrenched.”
This anti-Americanism is bin Laden’s triumph, said Hamid Mir in The News International. As the first Pakistani journalist to meet bin Laden and the last journalist to interview him, seven weeks after 9/11, I know what he wanted: to inflame the youths of Pakistan with hatred of America, to drive them to seek martyrdom. That dream is now coming true. The more Pakistanis the U.S. kills with its drone attacks and insulting violations of sovereignty, the more angry youths are available to be radicalized by al Qaida’s ideology. “If the U.S. and its allies want to prevent al Qaida attacks in future, they must throw their bad policies into the sea,” just as they dumped bin Laden’s body.
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