Osama Bin Laden Sleeps with the Fishes

Well, it took ten years, but justice finally caught up with Osama Bin Laden. Chalk one up for the good guys.

I’m intrigued by what appears to be unseemly haste in disposing of the carcass. I understand the desire to appear responsive to the Islamic world’s sensibilities, but it was less than twelve hours after the news broke that the first deniers and conspiracy theorists began making pronouncements that the whole incident had been faked. I would have dumped the body in a freezer until an independent authority could verify the identification process. Then weight the corpse and deep six it.

For me, the revelation that Bin Laden wasn’t hiding out in a cave is the most fascinating and disturbing part of the whole story. Abbottabad is only forty miles outside of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. One of the interesting wrinkles is that the entire operation was a massive violation of Pakistani territorial sovereignty. This was not a drone missile strike in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, where the central government’s control is honored more in the breach than the observance. We flew multiple helicopters deep inside Pakistan for a smash and grab operation. I would like to see more reporting on the Pakistan reaction to our unilateral military action inside their borders.

The big news is that it really calls our Afghanistan strategy into question. We invaded Afghanistan nine years ago for two purposes: bring Bin Laden to justice, and prevent al Qaeda from using the country as a staging ground for terrorist attacks on the US. It now turns out that for the last few years, all of our efforts in Afghanistan seem to have been wasted in advancing those goals. Bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan to find, and the locus of terrorist planning has shifted to other countries, such as Yemen.

We are involved in a hugely expensive exercise in state building in Afghanistan, working at the end of extremely long supply lines, and after nine years we have little to show for our efforts to build up Afghan institutions. If we stopped propping up the Karzai government with both money and troops, I have little doubt it would collapse like a house of cards. We may be accomplishing small incremental gains in nation building over there, but from what I read, there is nothing like self sustaining development occurring in Afghanistan.

We have achieved our war aims in Afghanistan. It is time to declare victory and go home.