Before dawn on May 2, a pair of Blackhawk helicopters carrying two dozen Navy seals left Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and entered Pakistani airspace using stealth technology to evade Pakistan’s radar systems.

Forty minutes after reaching their destination in Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, was dead.

When the team reentered Afghanistan’s airspace with bin Laden’s body, the sun had not yet risen, and the Pakistani government was still in the dark about the operation.

Why?

In the words of cia director Leon Panetta, “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”

So the U.S. doesn’t trust Pakistan, and believed Islamabad might help bin Laden escape the attack if it knew about the planned operation. The U.S.’s decision to raid bin Laden without telling Pakistan exemplifies the deep distrust that already existed between the U.S. and Pakistan, and the nature of the assault is further aggravating the tensions.

Islamabad’s Double Game and the Preexisting Tensions

Strains have been building between the U.S. and Pakistan for years.

The Afghan War not only dragged the two nations into an uncomfortable but essential embrace, but it also revealed profound differences between the two sides. At the heart of these differences lies Pakistan’s double game: On one hand, Islamabad gives vital intelligence support to Washington; on the other, it willingly ignores the U.S.’s enemies in Pakistan.

The rising tensions between Washington and Islamabad became public in December after a lawsuit filed in Pakistan exposed the identity of the man who was then station chief of the cia. The blown cover forced the organization to pull the vital agent out of Pakistan. Some interpreted the move as a calculated act of revenge by Pakistan after its chief, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, was named in a U.S. lawsuit concerning the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Since then, Washington and Islamabad have groused over a cia contractor’s killing of two armed Pakistani men under disputed circumstances.

The bin Laden killing didn’t spawn the distrust in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, but only exposed and exacerbated it.

Who Was Hiding Bin Laden?

From 2006 until his death last week, bin Laden lived in a compound in the Abbottabad district, a location not even a mile away from the Pakistan Military Academy. It is only around 31 miles from the center of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner described bin Laden’s compound in Bilal as “eight times larger than any other home in the area. It was surrounded by walls measuring 12 feet to 18 feet that were topped with barbed wire. There were additional inner walls that sectioned off parts of the compound and entry was restricted by two security gates.”

The residence was suspicious for other reasons as well. It had no Internet or phone lines, its residents were known to have burned their own trash, and the barbed wire atop the walls is unusual for the homes in the area. Stratfor notes additional odd details about bin Laden’s compound (May 5):

Security guards would also pay children who accidentally threw cricket balls into the compound rather than simply returning them. Its inhabitants avoided outside contact by not contributing to charity (thereby violating a Muslim custom) and by not allowing health care workers to administer polio vaccines to the children who lived in the compound, instead administering the vaccine themselves. Locals thought someone on the run from a tribal feud in Waziristan owned the compound, but they also noticed that its residents spoke Arabic.

Could local police have failed to notice the suspicious details of this compound? What about Pakistani military officials? How much did Pakistan’s most influential man, military head Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, know about bin Laden’s whereabouts?

These are the questions Washington is asking after having pumped over $18 billion in military and civilian aid into Pakistan over the last decade in the U.S.-Pakistani collaboration against terrorism.

Voicing the frustrations of many in Washington, U.S. counterterrorism chief John Brennan said, “It is inconceivable that Osama could have lived so many years without a support system.”

Pakistan Will Respond With “Full Force” to Future Raids

The U.S.’s decision to strike bin Laden without informing Islamabad deeply embarrassed the Pakistani government. The embarrassment intensified on May 9, when U.S. military officials said President Obama had insisted that the assault team be large enough to battle its way out of Pakistan in the event of confrontation from hostile Pakistani troops or police officers.

On May 3, Pakistani officials released a statement labeling the attack that killed the al Qaeda chief as “an unauthorized unilateral action.” The statement voices Islamabad’s “deep concerns and reservations” over Washington’s decision to conduct the operation “without prior information or authorization from Islamabad.”

The rhetoric has steadily escalated since then.

On May 9, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told Washington that Pakistan could react to future U.S. raids on its soil with “full force.” Any “overt or covert” attack would be met by a “matching response,” Gilani said. “Pakistan reserves the right to retaliate with full force. No one should underestimate the resolve and capability of our nation and armed forces to defend our sacred homeland.”

The significance of the rising tensions between Pakistan and the U.S. cannot be overstated.

The Trumpet has often warned of the danger of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal falling under the control of radical Islamism and Iran. For example, in January 2008, editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote that “Pakistan also has the nuclear bomb and could be taken over by radical Islam, with plenty of help from Iran.” This nation, the world’s seventh-most powerful military power, could soon become a “proxy of the Iranian mullahs,” he warned, and “this would be the worst possible disaster!”

Operation Neptune Spear exposed the fractious U.S.-Pakistan relationship, and made the wound even deeper. Islamists in Pakistan already hold great sway over the country’s shaky government, and Islamabad’s growing ire toward Washington will bolster their power. With much of the Muslim world blazing with uprisings, the time may be ripe for a coup that could ally nuclear Pakistan with Iran.

Jesus Christ specifically forewarned of the age of nuclear proliferation we are living in and showed that this time of peril points to the imminence of His return! To understand how events unfolding in Pakistan tie in to that hope-filled event, read “Pakistan and the Shah of Iran.”