Days after the Congress asked its leaders to stick to the party line on the Pahalgam terror attack its MP Charanjit Singh Channi has found himself at the receiving end of a volley by the BJP after demanding proof of the 2016 surgical strike.

A pickup truck and a tourist van collide on a highway near the famous park in eastern Idaho. 

​A pickup truck and a tourist van collide on a highway near the famous park in eastern Idaho.  

But to understand how we got there, and why it still matters in 2025, rewind a little. To a quiet garrison town called Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden once lounged in his compound, sipping chai not far from Pakistan’s elite military academy. That scene wasn’t fiction — it was a living embodiment of the double game Forsyth wrote about.