Members of the national security team in the Situation Room, May 1, 2011. (
White House photo)
The mission to take out bin Laden can only be described as a
strategic and operational success
A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.
What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden last Sunday and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.
American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him.
Here's more on that painstaking intelligence work, from Marc Ambinder at National Journal.
The way JSOC solved this problem remains a carefully guarded secret, but people familiar with the unit suggest that McChrystal and Flynn introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable intelligence. One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells, where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA and the NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding in that particular compound.
These technicians could “exploit and analyze” data obtained from the battlefield instantly, using their access to the government’s various biometric, facial-recognition, and voice-print databases. These cells also used highly advanced surveillance technology and computer-based pattern analysis to layer predictive models of insurgent behavior onto real-time observations.
For all its frightening implications for potential domestic surveillance, the point is that this successful raid should be described as an intelligence and police operation, as a "surgical" special forces operation that relied on good intelligence, careful cooperation, and not brute military force. Despite the valiant efforts and sacrifice of the 100,000 troops we've got in Afghanistan, this operation wasn't a success because of their boots on the ground.
Way back in 2004, when running for president, John Kerry had it absolutely right, when talking about fighting terrorism as comparable to fighting crime (and was lambasted by the Bush campaign for saying it).
''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' the article states as the Massachusetts senator's reply.
''As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''
Kerry was a prosecutor before he got into politics, and made fighting organized crime a priority.
It was critical for the Bush administration, as Katrina vanden Heuvel writes to create a war out of the "war on terror."
Rove understood that if the indefinite struggle against terror was generally framed as a “war,” it would become the master narrative of American politics-bringing with it the collateral damage we have witnessed in these last ten years.
The “war” metaphor—as retired American Ambassador Ronald Spiers wrote in a provocative piece in March 2004 in Vermont’s Rutland Herald, “is neither accurate nor innocuous, implying as it does that there is an end point of either victory or defeat.... A ‘war on terrorism’ is a war without an end in sight, without an exit strategy, with enemies specified not by their aims but by their tactics.... The President has found this ‘war’ useful as an all-purpose justification for almost anything he wants or doesn’t want to do; fuzziness serves the administration politically. It brings to mind Big Brother’s vague and never-ending war in Orwell’s 1984. A war on terrorism is a permanent engagement against an always-available tool.”
In the root of that false construction of the "war on terror" is the need to end it, now.
President Obama spoke in humane and sober terms tonight. It was a relief to hear in his words reminders of those (too brief) post -9/11 days when the idea of shared sacrifice, respect for the work of public servants, firefighters, first responders, and a sense of a larger common good pervaded our society and politics. Yet after the capture and killing of bin Laden, will political leaders have the courage to say that what we face is not a “war” on terrorism?
President Obama has tragically continued too many of the Bush era’s national security policies. Yet he is also a President who understands how wars threaten to undo reform Presidencies and also undermine the best values of this country. If we as citizens challenge the “war” framing, if we refuse, a decade after the savagery of 9/11’s attacks, to allow “war” framing to define the national psyche and our politics, if we demand our representatives stop couching virtually all foreign policy discussion in terms of terrorism, we have a chance to build a new and more effective security template.
Osama bin Laden wasn't found and killed because we still have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or because we are at war. This successful operation provides the justification and the opportunity for President Obama to end both the fighting wars (the mission really has been accomplished) and the false war, the war on terror.
End them both and let America be America again, without the constant fear, the ongoing erosion of civil liberties, the construct as America as victim.
And bring the troops home.