Steve Coll on Pakistan’s role in keeping Osama bin Laden safe in a suburban mansion for half a decade:

It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without it coming to the attention of anyone in Pakistan’s Army.

The initial circumstantial evidence suggests the opposite is more likely—that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury.

….Outside of the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence about culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters in nearby Rawalpindi: An exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of cooperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability, and so on.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence service takes risks that others would not dare take because Pakistan’s generals believe their nuclear deterrent keeps them safe from regime change of the sort underway in Libya, and because they have discovered over the years that the rest of the world sees them as too big to fail. Unfortunately, they probably are correct in their analysis; some countries, like some investment banks, do pose systemic risks so great that they are too big to fail, and Pakistan is currently the A.I.G. of nation-states. But that should not stop American prosecutors from following the law here as they would whenever any mass killer’s hideout is discovered.