bin Laden and El-Qaida

Obama's decision on how to kill bin Laden was a brave one. He has been accused of fecklessness, indecision and diffidence--his friends say he "leads from behind"--so any public failure in this attack on the house in Pakistan would have significant negative consequences. The symbolic position was worse for Obama. He has been compared to Carter frequently and Carter had a significant bad moment during his presidency that served to characterize his term, although the events were essentially beyond his control. In desperation he sent special forces into Iran to rescue the people taken hostage from the embassy there. They attacked by helicopter and it was more than a disaster, it was a fiasco and it tarred Carter forever. One can just imagine Obama's advisors urging him to attack with bombs or drones; at least a failure would be less obvious, perhaps even overlooked. A failure with helicopters and special troops would remind everyone of Carter.

But Obama braved it out. He wanted proof of who was there and wanted proof he was dead when we left. He took a great risk, was successful and deserves credit for it.

Now what?

When al-Qaida emerged on the American radar Clinton thought they should be fought like criminals. The problem with that approach is there is no way of coordinating anticriminal activities across borders. The Americans have had no success with Mexico with real drug criminals. Indeed, Pakistan proves that cooperation for an antiterrorist purpose is impossible; the government sympathizes with the enemy. Moreover, an attack on bin Laden would have been impossible had the Americans not taken a beachhead in Afganistan. There was another problem for Clinton; any successful attack on terrorists as criminals demands infiltration and Clinton was cool on using the type of person necessary for that assignment.

George Will wrote recently: "Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that Gen. David Petraeus has said there are perhaps about 100 al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan. 'Did anyone,' Lacey asks, 'do the math?' There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every al-Qaida fighter. It costs about $1 million a year to deploy and support every soldier — or up to $140 billion, or close to $1.5 billion a year, for each al-Qaida fighter.
'In what universe do we find strategists to whom this makes sense?'"


Now that bin Laden is dead, perhaps we can revisit our overall approach to these terrible people.