Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's chief, was able to evade detection in Pakistan for nine years due to the "collective failure" of the Pakistani state's military and intelligence authorities, and "routine" incompetence at every level of the civil governance structure, a Pakistani government commission has concluded.
The failure was so complete that, by page 87 of its report, the Commission investigating the circumstances around Bin Laden's killing in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad in May 2011 was forced to coin a term for it: "Governance Implosion Syndrome".
"[Osama bin Laden] was able to stay [in Abbottabad] due to a collective failure of the military authorities, the intelligence authorities, the police and the civilian administration. This failure included negligence and incompetence and at some undetermined level, a grave complicity may or may not have been involved," the Commission's scathing 336-page report says.