—H. L. MENCKEN After more than eight years spent looking for Osama bin Laden, the CIA finally got their first break in the hunt for the al Qaeda leader in August 2010, when Pakistani agents working for the CIA followed an al Qaeda courier from an Internet café in the city of Peshawar to an isolated compound just north of the city of Abbottabad, thirty-one miles northeast of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. Abbottabad has been a military garrison town since it was established by the British Army in 1853. After Pakistan obtained its independence from Great Britain in 1947, the Pakistani military took over the bases that had formerly been occupied by the British forces. Abbottabad is now the home of the regimental depots and training centers for two Pakistani Army regiments—the Baloch Regiment and the Frontier Force Regiment—with between two thousand and three thousand troops in residence at these bases at any one time. Just north of the city in the town of Kakul is the Pakistani Military Academy.
