On May 2nd in Pakistan US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of the al-Qaida international terrorist network. Mr bin Laden's compound was discovered to be in Abbottabad, a town that lies close to the capital, Islamabad, and is home to the country's premier military academy. The US acted unilaterally on intelligence that it has gathered over the course of the past few years. It disclosed after the raid that it had not sought the permission of the Pakistani government and had not informed it of its plans before it sent four helicopters to Abbottabad from a base in Afghanistan. The US said that it feared that such advance warning might compromise the planned raid.

The Pakistani reaction was initially muted. No official response was immediately forthcoming, but the Foreign Office eventually issued a statement saying that such unilateral action on Pakistani territory must be considered a one-off event and must not be seen as setting a precedent. Meanwhile, the military and the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), were immediately forced into damage-control mode, since the presence of Mr bin Laden in Abbottabad raised two very big questions. First, how could the world's most wanted terrorist have been hiding so close to the national capital, in a large and suspiciously well-fortified compound in a city with high security, without anyone being aware of his presence? Second, how was the US able to conduct the raid using four helicopters without Pakistan's army being aware of it until the operation was almost over? The Pakistani public and the domestic media are, unsurprisingly, focusing strongly on the latter point, which also raised the follow-on question in the mind of the populace of whether the army was capable of effectively ensuring the country's security and defending it from attack. In short, the incident has damaged the army's reputation for competence. On May 5th, in reference to the ostensible failure to notice Mr bin Laden's presence in the country, the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, ordered an investigation into what has been described by the prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, and others as an "intelligence failure". The resulting report will be presented to parliament.

On May 10th Mr Gilani spoke to parliament about the incident, but his speech skirted any of these difficult questions. Instead, he emphasised the losses that Pakistan had borne in the global war on terrorism, avoided any acceptance of responsibility for the presence of terrorist leaders in Pakistan, and rejected allegations that Pakistani authorities had been complicit in Mr bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad as "absurd". Mr Gilani's remarks implicitly held the US partly to blame for al-Qaida's presence in Pakistan. For example, he spoke at some length about US support for Islamist militants in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and said that Pakistan could not be held responsible for the "flawed policies and blunders of others".

Following the killing of Mr bin Laden, Islamist groups operating in Pakistan threatened to attack Pakistani political and military targets, as well as US interests, in retaliation. Security throughout Pakistan was tightened in response.