Where has Osama bin Laden been for the last 10 years?

That is a question that most of us want answered because of where he was found; living comfortably in a huge mansion in a city with a large Pakistani military base and in an area where there were many retired Pakistani officers.

Abbotabad is about 80 miles from Islamabad and is hardly "remote." It is considered a suburb of the city and has a population of 80,000.

It is very possible that sometime in the last couple of years, bin Laden fled from the rugged Northwest Frontier Provinces because our drone strikes were hitting al-Qaeda leadership cadres with stunning regularity. In this, we were getting good cooperation from the Pakistani government and their intelligence service, the ISI.

But bin Laden's move into Abbotabad raises questions of his collusion with the Pakistani military and ISI. It is believed the ISI helped facilitate his escape from the box we had him in during the Tora Bora operation in 2002 so it is not a farfetched idea to contemplate the same kind of assistance given the terrorist when it became too dangerous for him to hang out in the tribal areas.

President Zardari of Pakistan is in a bind. He does not control the military as most presidents in other countries do. The military/intelligence apparatus is a separate power center in Pakistan and they possess  the national security and foreign policy portfolios. It is clear that despite the White House trying to give Zardari a fig leaf by announcing Pakistani cooperation with the operation, the fact is, they were never privy to the details and didn't know when it was going down.

We are giving $7 billion in aid to these folks over the next 5 years. I think it would be nice if we discovered who, if anyone, in the Pakistani military establishment assisted the world's number one terrorist in hiding from American justice and if that cooperation with bin Laden goes all the way back to 9/11.