I mean, there is a way they didn't know it though. There aren't any hard evidences available today that prove this happened. Imo, it's pretty unlikely. Like I said, he never left the compound or ever got any sunlight. He didn't even have internet access. He passed all his messages through couriers to other people. When he was found, out of his enormous trove of documents, not a single one indicated any kind of coordination with any intelligence service.

I also don't get what Pakistan gains from sheltering him. Turning him into the US aids them tremendously, and Al Qaeda was not a valuable or useful asset for years before Bin Laden was found. New groups were forming at the time as well, so they could have easily turned him and handed the money over to those groups which had beef with him anyways. Again, it's all assuming they were sheltering him knowingly.

Like I said before. He was very close by, but he was locked down in a compound. How many people here on HN know anything about the people or activities going on in the house 2 blocks away from them? The army also cannot just search everyone's house randomly.

Consider India, they equally have pretty poor competence with catching terrorists. Many of the biggest terrorist attacks in India were not caught and evaded detection. Even the latest terrorists seem to have evaded detection. Pakistan doesn't have a far more advanced security service. Isn't it far more likely they are incompetent? Idk, the harboring Bin Laden claim never made much sense and Occam's Razor always told me the most likely option is probably the real one, in the absence of any hard evidence.

Why do you assume that nobody in the Pakistani military may be motivated by factors such as religious extremism, above and beyond simple utility calculations?

It may very well be that some people in ISI were sheltering Bin Laden for no reason other than that he was a genuine hero to them.

It's very possible that some people sheltered him outside of the official policy or whatever. It's even possible that it was ISI / Pak gov't official policy, but again there's no proof of any of these things.

It is also possible, that he just was able to hide from the entire world close to an army base in a compound he never exited from, never approached a window near, and never accessed internet from.

Everything is possible, there's no proof either way. And I don't see what the govt or army or ISI would gain from harboring him as a policy matter. If someone is crazy and personally helped out, that's not what most people are even implying is it? That's much more reasonable and doesn't really have much to do with the current conflict and the claim that the latest terror attack was sponsored by Pakistan (again, possible but not proven)