Battleland

The Silence from Pakistan

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Holmes

There was a more important story over the weekend than the U.S. propaganda effort to demystify Osama bin Laden by releasing five silent video clips. It involved another kind of quiet coming from Pakistan worth noting, as Karin Brulliard did in Saturday’s Washington Post:

In a nation that is home to an alphabet soup of militant organizations subscribing to the late al-Qaeda leader’s violent ideology, retaliatory bombs did not explode. The cities did not fill with banned organizations’ foot soldiers vowing revenge. A top religious party drummed up a few hundred demonstrators Friday afternoon, but their stated agenda — to protest the bin Laden killing — barely seemed to register, and instead they fell back on familiar anti-government, anti-American slogans.

The cool reaction to bin Laden’s killing is, as Sherlock Holmes might note, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time – the canine that didn’t bark.