Osama in Pakistan

John McCain is asked whether he would order US forces to strike Osama bin Laden in Pakistan if they had a read on his location, and he bizarrely doesn't commit to doing so citing Pakistani sovereignty as his concern. That seems a bit odd to me; it's well-known and well-understood (though perhaps not by McCain) that the Pakistani government doesn't exercise effective control over significant swathes of its nominal territory and that this is a large part of the problem of al-Qaeda hideouts there.

Under the circumstances, Pakistani sovereignty can't be your top concern. The legitimate hesitation (though perhaps not the thing to say during an election) I would have before blasting away at OBL would have to do with collateral damage. Killing or capturing bin Laden would be an excellent thing to do, but with any of these targets it's probably more important to check first and make sure you're not also going to blow up a school bus or something as you go after the main target.