Only around 1,000 people - of what had been anticipated would be a 10,000-strong crowd - were present to wave goodbye to their candidate, or so they thought.
In the Washington Post, President Asif Ali Zardari wrote that bin Laden "was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone," adding that "a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden".
He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone.
"He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone," Zardari wrote, without offering further defense against accusations his security services should have known where bin Laden was hiding.
He added that Bin Laden was "not anywhere we had anticipated he would be" when American special forces stormed his hide-out just north of Islamabad, the capital, in an operation conducted without the cooperation or even advance knowledge of Pakistan.
"That they were doing this at all suggests they were farther along than the intelligence community had anticipated they would be," Walter B. Slocombe, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview.
The package is considerably larger than the market had anticipated and would be the largest rescue effort by the fund since it shored up Brazil in 1998, at the end of the Asian currency crisis.
The process turned out to be quite a bit more demanding than I had anticipated it would be.
Analysts had anticipated $87 million would be a baseline expectation, not a high-end target.
