Osama compound becomes an election issue in US

WASHINGTON: Osama bin Laden`s discovery in a compound in Abbottabad has become an election issue in the United States where at least one candidate for the 2012 presidential election emphasised the need to reassess America`s relations with Pakistan after the discovery.
“When I learned that after paying $20 billion since 9/11, they had been housing him in Pakistan, I kind of forgot what the word `ally` meant,” said presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.
“There is a point when you have to say to people around the world, `How stupid do you think we are?`”
Since President Barack Obama, being the incumbent, does not have to fight for nomination, all the candidates seeking nomination are from the Republican Party. President Obama is assured a ticket from his Democratic Party.
Former Alaska governor and another 2012 possible candidate, Sarah Palin, raised “serious questions that demand answers” about Osama bin Laden`s presence in Pakistan.
In remarks posted on her Sarah-PAC website, Ms Palin, who was a vice presidential candidate in 2008, questioned how long Bin Laden lived in “an affluent city outside Islamabad” and not “in a dark cave in the mountains”. She asked why the “most wanted man in the world” was able to avoid detection and whether Pakistani leaders were assisting him.
“There are lots of questions, lots of questions about the burial, about photos; and those things will certainly be disclosed, we must trust,” she said.
“I said Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan, and I was very loud and clear,” said a third presidential candidate, Donald Trump. “We give Pakistan billions and billions of dollars a year, I said, long before the event took place. `You tell them, we`re not giving you any money unless you hand over to us Osama bin Laden` and nobody else picked it up.”
But Mitt Romney, arguably one of the top contenders for the Republican nomination to face off against President Obama in 2012, sought not to politicise Bin Laden`s.
“I think the killing of Osama bin Laden is an enormous success, and I don`t know if it helps or hurts the president politically, but I really don`t care,” said the former Massachusetts governor.
“The right thing is we got the bad guy, and the nation celebrates that,” Romney added. “We`re all Americans. This is not a Republican or a Democrat thing; this is an American thing.” President Obama, being the incumbent, also has to be careful in using a foreign policy matter as an election issue.
“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don`t know who or what that support network was,” he told an interviewer when asked if he believed Pakistan knew Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.