"His whereabouts ... were extremely well-known to the Pakistanis for a long time"

Pakistan last year began a series of major military offensives against the “Pakistani Taliban,” which had taken over large swaths of the northwestern part of the country and claimed responsibility for a wave of suicide bombings there. The CIA has directed unmanned drones to fire missiles at the group’s leaders in sanctuaries in the Federally Administered Tribal Area along the Afghanistan border.

The Pakistanis, however, resisted taking action against the Afghan Taliban, based in the southern province of Baluchistan, in an effort to preserve their influence in Afghanistan. Using the leverage of billions of dollars in new U.S. aid, the administration has cited increased cooperation between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban to argue that increased cooperation was in Pakistan’s interest. In Afghanistan, they warned, Obama’s new strategy was about to turn the tide of battle, and the Pakistanis needed to choose sides.

Pakistani officials portrayed the situation through the opposite side of the same lens, saying that the Americans had begun to realize Pakistan’s importance in the Afghan equation and the key role it could play in brokering any political settlement there.