Pakistan

The search for Osama bin Laden lasted more than 10 years, through three U.S. presidencies. Under President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, our intelligence agencies began their relentless pursuit of bin Laden. The death of almost 3,000 innocent men, women and children on Sept. 11, 2001, intensified that search. And building upon that effort, last week a team of superbly trained and equipped U.S. Navy SEALs executed a jaw-dropping raid into Pakistan that resulted in bin Laden's death.

On weekday mornings, I'll post the most controversial, shocking and (of course) ridiculous stories for your reading pleasure. That way, when you walk into work, you'll be the master of witty conversation. National  • Stating the obvious: Obama: Bin Laden had support network in Pakistan . (CNN)  • Voyeurism of narcissism: New bin Laden videos released. (CNN)  • Some bad dudes: Obama pays tribute to SEAL Team 6 . (Reuters)  • The mission marches on: U.S. drones dropping bombs in Pakistan . (VOA)

Osama bin Laden's death in Pakistan last week at the hands of Navy SEALs was a moral and symbolic victory for the U.S., but it complicated the already tense relationship between the Obama administration and Islamabad. The feeling in Washington is that the Pakistanis either were complicit in hiding bin Laden or are simply incompetent. Pakistanis, meanwhile, are furious that the Americans violated their country's sovereignty by mounting a covert mission deep inside their territory without the government's knowledge or consent.

Only in America would a president respond to the public celebrating over the killing of Osama bin Laden with the sports cliche he used: "We don't need to spike the football. " But millions of Americans who have their eyes glued on gridirons across the country on weekend television knew at once what he meant — that there was no need to cheer the event as if the home team had just scored the winning touchdown. President Barack Obama uttered the advice in announcing that no photographs or video would be released of bin Laden's corpse, or its disposal into the Arabian Sea, to prove that he really was dead and gone.

A Pakistani man living in Maryland has been charged with scheming to smuggle materials and equipment used in nuclear processing to agencies in his home country, federal officials announced Wednesday. Nadeem Akhtar, 45, of Silver Spring is accused in a grand jury indictment of buying the materials from U.S. companies and shipping them to blacklisted Pakistani agencies by lying to shipping companies about what the packages contained between 2005 and 2010. Some of the goods Akhtar and an unnamed co-defendant arranged to ship to sites in Pakistan, prosecutors said, include radiation-detection equipment, resins used to purify coolant water in nuclear power plants, calibration devices and selector switches, which fall under Department of Commerce rules that closely regulate the export of "dual-use items," or materials that potentially have both commercial and nuclear purposes.

The new year began on a somber note when a Coptic Christian church in Egypt was bombed while worshippers were leaving from a New Year's Mass. Christian and Muslim relationships worsened when, on Tuesday, the bodyguard of Pakistani governor Salman Taseer assassinated him. The bodyguard stated that he assassinated Mr. Taseer because the governor spoke out against Pakistan's blasphemy law and defended Asia Bibi — a Christian woman who is accused of...

As the floodwaters have swept down into southern Pakistan, devastating food- and cotton-producing areas, threatening dams that have held lesser tides back for many years, interrupting power generation, and displacing added millions of poor, rural Pakistanis every day, the humanitarian crisis calls for strong and swift international action. But Pakistan's friends must realize that these floods are so severe that they also raise existential questions: Can the Pakistani state and society survive this natural catastrophe?

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is critical to American security interests and the fight against terrorism. It has also been marked in recent years by a jarring note of suspicion and distrust on both sides about the ultimate intentions of the other. U.S. officials have expressed increasing frustration with the Pakistani army's apparent unwillingness to go after Taliban insurgents based along the country's border with Afghanistan. That's why the American response to one of Pakistan's worst-ever natural disasters is of such extraordinary importance.

Philip Alston, the United Nations' special representative on extrajudicial killings, has presented a report to that body's Human Rights Council calling on the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of unmanned Predator drones to kill suspected terrorists in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan, which are outside the official war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. His report also suggests that the U.S. military, rather than the CIA, should be in charge of running the drone attacks because it is more accountable under international law than the secretive civilian spy agency.