New Delhi’s Abbottabad Mission

President Obama was right and brave to send the SEALs to bring justice to Osama Bin Laden in his lair in Pakistan. But that mission will also have another—unintended—consequence. When (not if) the next Pakistani-based terror attack in India happens, New Delhi will have to decide if it can and will do its own Abbottabad.

Pakistan is home to more terrorists than any other country. Osama lived less than a mile from the country’s top military academy, its West Point, for five years. His heir Ayman Zawahiri is probably somewhere nearby. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, 9/11’s tactical maestro, was in the country’s military capital Rawalpindi when he was captured. Mullah Omar, Amir of Believers to al-Qaeda and head of the Afghan Taliban, is either in Quetta or Karachi. Hafez Saed, head of Lashkar-e-Tayyeiba and mastermind of the Mumbai massacre, is in Lahore. Fazul Rahman Khalil, head of Harakat al-Mujahedin, which hijacked an Indian airliner in 1999, is in an Islamabad suburb. Dawood Ibrahim, who killed hundreds with bombs on Mumbai’s metro in 1993, lives in Karachi. There are no secrets here—the Pakistani press reports their hideouts on a regular basis.

After a decade of fruitless effort, the CIA finally found Bin Laden last year. Obama did the right thing—he told Pakistan nothing and took out the greatest mass murderer in American history.

Read the full article at nationalinterest.org >>