Osama bin Laden’s death has the United States Congress pointing fingers at Pakistan and many in the Obama administration expressing thinly veiled exasperation. But it probably won’t mean the break-up of a marriage of convenience that is maddening to both the US and nuclear-armed Pakistan. The alternative would be worse.

The commando raid on bin Laden’s comfortable house deep inside Pakistan exposes a stark truth that bodes ill for the decade-long US strategy to coax greater cooperation from its wavering counterterrorism ally and bankroll its weak leaders: Pakistani officials tolerated or helped the biggest-ever mass murderer of Americans or were so inept that he lived for years right under their noses.

Shamefaced Pakistani authorities say it is the latter, but some in the US Congress are already clamouring to cut or eliminate the nearly $1.3 billion in annual aid to Pakistan. And the Obama administration may be tempted to opt for more go-it-alone operations.

Through either complicity or incompetence, Pakistan’s failure to do anything while the al-Qaeda mastermind spent up to six years in a conspicuously oversized villa near a military academy raises alarming questions.

Members of Congress are divided for now on Pakistan, with some lawmakers saying the death proves that Pakistan has been playing a double game all along — supporting US enemies on the theory that it might one day need them — and others calling for more US engagement to expand the fight against terrorism. The prevailing idea seems to be to press the US advantage while Pakistan’s military might be more motivated to demonstrate its resolve.

The bin Laden operation has revealed the shifting ground: The Obama administration trusted its partner so little that it only told the government of the military incursion when it was over. And in a statement, the Pakistani government warned that an “unauthorised unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule,” calling it a “threat to international peace and security.” It has made clear that it had nothing to do with the operation.

Pakistan’s government is clearly embarrassed, though it insists that it was ignorant of bin Laden’s whereabouts. The Zardari government and the Pakistani military are balancing a response that answers domestic anger at perceived US high-handedness yet avoids focusing too greatly on violated sovereignty so they don’t feed that anger or make it appear they are courting those aggrieved by bin Laden’s death.

But the problems with Pakistan aren’t likely to go away — especially if the US gathers intelligence that more top terror suspects such as new al-Qaeda No. 1 Ayman al-Zawahri, the Taliban’s Mullah Omar or militant Siraj Haqqani are hiding there.

Pakistan is an unreliable partner but one worth holding onto, the thinking goes. No cooperation on fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda is a far scarier notion than the half-hearted assistance Islamabad sometimes appears to offer. Pakistan is key to ending the war in Afghanistan and bringing American soldiers home. Letting the weak government wobble too much is unacceptable because that could allow Islamist radicals to get their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.