Omar:

Thanks for the link. I had not seen that.

Incompetent or complicit? Both. Initially incompetent. You yourself well described one of the ways the Pak Army/ISI played them, the whole romance of the Raj bit. That was but one facet of the incompetence.

But they aren't completely stupid people and that is where the complicit comes in. When they realized they been had and more importantly what fools they had been to have been had so completely, they became complicit because they had to cover that up. Their primary motivation became avoiding embarrassment, hundreds of dead 21 year old NASCAR fans and thousands of dead Afghan and Pakistani dirt farmers were small price to pay if the right people continued to look good.

So after that it took on a life of its own. It is almost as if the multi-stars and genii inside the beltway were blackmailing themselves. The Pak Army/ISI didn't have to do anything to keep the deception going. Once it was set up it ran on its own.

The only price they had to pay was to give up OBL. Somehow we found out on our own where he was, sort of probably. They let us confirm it and then they let us take him. That was it. They give up one obsolete guy and the game went on. They won in exchange for Mr. Obama getting to say we got him.

Maybe you are right the Americans as presently constituted can not be what we were. It will be bad for the world though. There is no other country suited to maintain the system of free oceanic navigation the British and us set up and maintained. Bad for us too as an island trading nation.