Nothing suspicious here!

So Osama bin Laden is dead, and he sure was hidden well. I mean, that tiny spider hole on some random isolated farm... oh wait, that was the other guy.

Nothing to see here!

No, this supervillain was in his own Castle Grayskull, down the street from the Pakistani military academy, in a pleasant neighborhood full of retired Pakistani army officers and their wives. You can see it on Google Maps here (it's the compound dead center, with the totally nonsuspicious quasi-medieval curtain walls and the central keep) and we've included an artist's rendition to the right. Apparently no one in Abbotabad thought anything was amiss when persons unknown built a gigantic fortress, complete with 18 foot walls, barbed wire and security cameras, and were then never seen or visited save by two poor men who could not possibly have afforded their own personal fortress. Suspicions continued not to be raised when this not so secret lair was left unconnected to telephone and internet services, nor when the unseen inhabitants burned their own trash rather than let it be collected. In his fortress, Osama spent the last several years chillin' like a villain, with his wife and at least one of his sons in tow.

When I first heard he was dead, I was surprised and pleased, but then I starting feeling a little embarrassed for my country- after all, it had taken us ten years to hunt down the world's only 6'6" Arab with kidney failure. At first I imagined he'd been pulled from a cave or some farmer's hovel. When I heard Abbotabad and read that it was basically the New Haven of Afghanistan, I thought, wow, how clever, he must have been hiding in an unassuming little house, blending in with a thousand other such little houses.

Al-Qaeda plots strategy

But no. He was in a giant goddamned fortress, just like the fucking Legion of Doom. Seriously. I remember as a child wondering why the police didn't notice the ridiculous lairs supervillains build themselves, but I suppose that aspect of cartoons is perfectly accurate- when confronted with a building eight times the size of surrounding residences, featuring tinted windows, high walls, barbed wire, and no visible residents, the authorities really do figure it's probably nothing to worry about.


In all seriousness, the place he was found does more than raise serious questions about the commitment of the Pakistani government to fighting al-Qaeda- it answers them. As Christopher Hitchens writes, "If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid." The BBC reports that the compound was "well within" the Abbotabad military cantonment, and that the area has a heavy military presence, complete with patrols and checkpoints. Someone in the Pakistani government- someone powerful- knew he was there and was protecting him. Pakistan is not our friend.