The Rashomon Effect: Retelling the Killing of Osama Bin Laden, 10 Years Since

AKSHOBH GIRIDHARADAS

Introduction

After 11 September 2001, when a group of militants associated with the Al-Qaeda staged coordinated attacks on the United States (US) and killed almost 3,000, Osama bin Laden became the world’s most wanted man. In the following years, US forces tried but failed to hunt for him across Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was almost a decade later when they found him, living in a compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad, Pakistan, some 120 km north of the capital, Islamabad. In the early hours of 2 May 2011, US forces raided the compound and killed Bin Laden, and then President Barack Obama called it “a good day for America” and pronounced the world to be “safer”.[1] Ten years since, the question remains: How did Bin Laden evade US intelligence for many years and end up undetected — and likely protected — in a town in a country that is supposed to be an American ally?

This special report builds on the narrations told to this author by two key diplomatic officials who were in office at the time of the raid in Abbottabad that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden: Hussain Haqqani, the Pakistan Ambassador to the United States at the time, and Cameron Munter, then American Ambassador to Pakistan.[a]

The aim is to ponder the “Rashomon Effect” on the 2 May 2011 raid that killed Bin Laden, through the recollections of Amb. Haqqani of what transpired in Washington, and of…