Bin Laden’s rumored death — my take on a possible Pakistani smoke screen

Is this a way of trying to get OBL to show himself and have his whereabouts more tightly nailed down, and so a French-Saudi-U.S. concoction of some sort? Possible, and I’m not the one to have invented this line of thinking. But, that’s only one possibility.

Here’s another one that I consider could be more likely, even much more likely.

Think about Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s recent agreement, earlier this month with the Waziristan and Northwest Frontier area to let it basically be autonomous. Then add in Bush’s public comments earlier this week about reserving the right to go after OBL wherever, whenever.

Factor in that the Islamabad/Waziristan agreement was in negotiations for some time, and that the U.S. knew at least the basic parameters of it for some time before it was announced. From this, assume that Rice or somebody else made some high-level private noise about “hot pursuit” before Bush’s public comment.

Then, is this somehow a “leak” engineered by Musharraf to say, in essence: “Move along. There's nothing to see here”? Or, beyond that, a shot across the bow from Musharraf to the U.S. to say that if you try to do too much intelligence sniffing on my side of the border with Afghanistan, the ISS might just actually help to cover up OBL’s tracks?