In the stash of hard drives, thumb drives, and personal papers discovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound, one especially revealing find was his personal diary. According to an analyst privy to the frequent updates of translated material being posted to the intelligence community’s classified internet, the late Al Qaeda leader periodically recorded his amusement that U.S. drones were searching for him in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan while he was living comfortably less than a quarter of a mile from a Pakistani military academy. “Bin Laden was yukking it up about how clueless we were,” the source says…

To survive for six years in the posh Islamabad suburb of Abbottabad, bin Laden almost certainly relied on what might be called a “deep state”—a network of current and retired intelligence and military officers who are actively undermining the official policy of Pakistan’s government. “I have no doubt that members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts,” says Representative Steve Rothman, a New Jersey Democrat who sits on the House subcommittees that fund the military and foreign-aid budgets and who has attended top-secret briefings on the May 1 raid. “The question remains, however, how far that knowledge went up the command chain in Pakistan.”…

The United States was able to prevent the deep state from thwarting its attack on bin Laden, but in doing so, it may have alienated the cooperative elements of the military. A week after the raid, a Pakistani newspaper printed the name of the CIA station chief—a leak that almost surely came from the ISI—and the army accused the United States of violating its national sovereignty. Meanwhile, the debate in Washington has mostly centered on whether or not to cut off the flow of aid money to Pakistan, which misses the point that the real problem runs much deeper.