Bin Laden's continued survival acts as recruiting tool and proof of religious blessing to AQ. His capture or death woudl indicate the obverse.

Not to mention, there have been heady amounts of money on the table for snitching bin Laden out, ever since the Cole bombing. The man is dead, the body probably buried very deep or burned.

Noam, while I agree that one shoudl presume that catching bin Laden will be difficult and the overall war against terrorism is no mean feat, it would seem you make a very poor case in defense of The Shrub.

While I agree with your assertion that there was no lack of incentive for Bush to do his absolute best to capture bin Laden, it seems to me that Bush's incompetency explains many things in regards to the war in Afghanistan, the summation of which could be described as a shortage of reinforcements required to escalate operations in Afghanistan to the point where the troops are doing more than hunkering down in forts and playing bull's eye to terrorist snipers.

You might think the Bushies were eager to capture bin Laden, but for about seven years now they've shown no evidence of such eagerness.

"I'm all for catching the guy ..."

Really? Because the rest of this post seems to offer reasons for not trying very hard to catch the guy. Now, maybe as a tactical political matter, it might be a good idea for the incoming administration not to make a big deal of renewing the quest to bring bin Laden to justice, or justice to bin Laden. But Obama has already staked out a position to Bush's right on hunting bin Laden. He needs to follow through. Politically tactful or not, it's the right thing to do.

Also, the "finish the job against the people who attacked us on 9/11" argument is the best lever of persuasion Obama will have in the coming year for hastening the withdrawal from Iraq. It was never about motivation; it's about competence and resources. We can assume increased competence, but the resources will depend on winding down the commitment in Iraq.

Maybe he's planning to put McCain on the case. After all, didn't he boast that he knew exactly how to get Bin Laden?

I agree that basic logic suggests that this is not goal one should presume can be met, but I do find it interesting that PE Obama makes this announcement after he starts receiving the PDBs

Map below:

                 Oops, stop and get rope and grappling hook.

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     BINGO!     >>>------->  |  X  | <-------<<< (Gates Of Hell)      

Obama bin Laden? What?

But seriously, what GSpinks said. There was a very good Frontline program recently on Afghanistan and the truth is we're stuck in the mud there, playing defense for lack of resources while the country slips out of our grasp. Meanwhile, al Qaeda has a de facto base in Waziristan. I realize the War on Terror may not be MoveOn.org's favorite issue but Obama's focus on Afghanistan and bin Laden was one of the bright spots in an otherwise underwhelming - if largely satisfactory - foreign policy portfolio. Good for one, and I hope he gets the job done.

Hey, imagine the headlines "Obama nabs Osama!"

Rhubarbs is right. If you buy Obama's incessantly repeated claim that the Iraq war yanked our eye off the Bin Laden ball, then that explains perfectly well [along with this administration's general incompetence problem] why OBL is still running around. Unless he choked on a chicken bone and nobody's telling.

Noam says the effort to catch bin Laden "appears to have stalled out under Bush" and then says just a couple sentences later "you have to figure the Bushies were dying" to catch him. So, does that mean the Bushies gave up because they've determined that it's futile to even try to catch OBL? Or was Noam saying that the Bushies were dying to catch OBL, but couldn't bestir themselves to actually do sometihing about it? The latter dovetails with what we know about the administration's general level of competence, and it leaves a lot of space for Obama to try something new. And indeed he is. As the Wapo article states, part of the plan will be trying to find Talibans who'll turn against AQ (mirroring the successful Sons of Iraq strategy in Iraq). Another part involves talking to Syria and Iran, neither of whom are fans of AQ or the Taliban (and neither of whom are on the Bushies' speed dial, despite the fact that the Iranians assisted us against the Taliban after 9/11).

GSpinks and CharlesFosterKane are on the right track. The Bush administration suffers no lack of will, but they do suffer a lack of competence. Part of this lack of competence is a result of ideology. Rumsfeld really thought that both Afghanistan and Iraq could be done on the cheap. Their belief that we would be welcomed as liberators stemmed from ideology as well, and it resulted in a lack of competence when the insurgency grew and required a real response. The Bush administration has also shown itself to be incompetent in its use of intelligence, believing only that which confirms its ideology. Who knows how many times the CIA has had good intelligence on Bin Laden, but has been ignored by the Neocons at the Pentagon in light of conflicting intelligence from the loyal Bushies in the DIA. Capturing Bin Laden is a difficult task to be sure, but this administration has no doubt made it even harder.

That should read "Good for him" though I suppose you could read it as "Good for the One" with slight modifications.

I have a question for any FP/Afghanistan/Al Qaeda wonks out there. What do you think of Obama's more aggressive stance towards Waziristan - which it seems the Bush administration has already endorsed, much to Pakistan's chagrin. On the one hand, is it the kind of action we need in order to assume an offensive position in the region? On the other, would it destablizie a nuclear-armed Pakistan, putting the government in jihadist hands? I'm honestly not sure what I think of this approach - on one end of the spectrum striking bin Laden even if the Paki government waffles is a no-brainer; on the other, if Obama goes further, widening the scope of the war into Waziristan - well, do we have a Cambodia/Vietnam situation on our hands?

One question Obama needs to answer is what to do if you actually capture OBL.  Executing him would be a gift to the jihadists.  How would you get a bloodthirsty public to realize that the best thing to do is let him sit shamefully in a cell next to Manuel Noriega.  Make them cell-mates, which would be sufficient punishment for both of them.

Suggestion to TNR editors: please avoid putting "Obama['s]" directly before "bin Laden" in headlines. Thank you.

stgla,

Probably the best thing to do would be kill him in the field. Still a martyr, but not as much of one as if he was brought to the U.S., tried, and executed. I mean, this whole thing is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Hey, maybe the Bushies have him undercover and haven't told anyone because they don't want to make him a "martyr"...there's an idea.

This is totally subjective, but I've been struck recently by a number of (mostly conservative?) commentators who assert that OBL is dead.  This would seem to serve the purpose of elevating the Bush/Cheney theory of the world and dismissing Obama's, as the implication is that Obama is going to waste resources by pouring them into a hunt for someone who essentially doesn't exist any more.

We have a difficult problem, typically ignored by the Bushies, that has very few potential upsides:  what to do about Pakistan.  This is a country whose security establishment supports the Taliban in many concrete ways while claiming to be an ally in the struggle against Islamist terrorism.  This is also a country armed with nuclear weapons, but whose political stability is anything but secured.  This is, furthermore, country that is used as an unassailable base by the Islamist forces who want to re-take Afghanistan.

It seems to me that Obama's declared intent to hunt down Bin Laden is a kind of shorthand for trying to get a grip on the Pakistan threat.  Bush is going to hand over the keys on 1/20 and five minutes later the GOP will be drafting its "Democrats Cut'n'Run from Iraq" attack ads for 2010.  If the new administration withdraws from both Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter how rational a decision that might be, Obama will be accused of retreating because he's either (a) an appeaser or (b) incompetent.  He has to -- again, no matter what a rational analysis might say -- have at least one war going in order to hammer his national security credentials into place, and from his pov Afghanistan is the one that makes more sense, because Pakistan is the problem that we have even less of a grip on than we should.

I see a poisoned gift-basket for Obama, however, because the Bushies have created a lose-lose situation in Iraq in which there are doomsday scenarios whether we stay or whether we go.  My great hope is that we can do the drawdown from Iraq without a major disaster.

Woudl, shoudl.

(sorry, dbhuff, gspinks.. :)

Charles Foster Kane, the best thing Obama could do is inform Pakistan that if it is incapable of sealing its border with Afghanistan, we will have to do the job for it, with all the unpleasant consequences that are likely to ensue.

nbarry: are you really suggesting that the US should seal Pakistan's border with Afghanistan? If so, how are we going to do that? Occupy Waziristan? Really?

s'okay jobeek.

As for waziristan, I think the real issue is two-fold: Pakistanis don't want to feel occupied and they don't want to die. If we can avoid both of these, and maybe throw in something to improve their quality of life a bit, we should be allowed to act as we deem appropriate to apprehend OBL and might even start to receive some extra assistance in the form of "little birdies".

We have already destroyed one terrorist organization in our history -- the Ku Klux Klan.  And in hunting down Osama bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda, we should keep that experience in mind.

Invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will not kill al-Qaeda anymore than occupying the south helped kill the KKK -- in fact, the KKK was created during and because of the occupation.

We can destroy al-Qaeda, but we'll need to borrow the same tactics that were successful against the KKK -- infiltration, sowing mistrust among members, turning members against one another.

We need to turn down the temperature in the middle east.  We need to create goodwill, we need to triangulate populations across the middle east -- work with liberals and moderates against the radicals on the far right.  We need to be able to recruit locals to infiltrate al-Qaeda cells and spy on them.  Al-Qaeda is a paranoid organization, but we need to direct that paranoia away from the outside world and toward itself.  Make members question one another.  Tear the organization apart from the inside.

I don't know if this is exactly what the incoming Obama administration has in mind.  Something like it could be.  But in any event, the Obama team will be brining new strategies and tactics to bear.  The old way, the Bush way, is clearly not working.  Brute force is not working.  Maybe a smarter approach will.

The idea that we can "root out the Taliban" or "win in Afghanistan" by sending a few more combat brigades is utter nonsense. First, The Taliban are essentially The Pashtuns, a nation of about forty millions on both sides of perhaps the world's most rugged and inaccessible border.

Second, Afghanistan has defied being "won" since the days of Alexander the Great. Replicating the Soviet strategy of supporting a central government with lots of troops doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea.

Osama bin Laden is a symbolic figure, probably a dead one. He and Afghanistan combined don't amount to one percent of the strategic importance of Iraq.

Given that the "strategic importance of Iraq" is roughly zero, Robert Powell is asking us to divide zero by one hundred in order to determine the strategic importance of OBL and Afghanistan.

Seriously, on all strategic questions, we need to start with assessing the walk-away option. What is the worst that could happen _for the United States_ if we simply walked away from the problem. What if we washed out hands of Iraq and got out as quickly as possible? How would the material interests of the United States be affected? Not even the most dire genocide-predicting conservatives bother to make a case for actual harm to the United States beyond the harm the invasion has already done. We've already accomplished everything we set out to accomplish in Iraq; not even American national credibility is at stake in Iraq anymore. There might be humanitarian fallout from a too-fast U.S. withdrawal, but the costs of any such disaster would be paid by Iraqis, not by Americans, and so those potential costs do not weigh on strictly strategic scales.

With regard to OBL and the Taliban, however, U.S. national credibility remains on the line. The president of the United States promised to "bring bin Laden to justice, or bring justice to him." And both the president and Congress promised to punish the Taliban as though it carried out the 9/11 attacks if it did not hand over OBL. It did not, and so the United States is bound by its word, written in law, to capture or kill OBL and other top al-Qaeda leaders and also to destroy the Taliban. Iraq-only conservatives, like Mr. Powell, would have us show the world that when the Untied States is attacked, we will not exact our promised punishment against those who attack us. That would be a strategic disaster; it amounts, in effect, to surrender in the war on terror.

I feel that it is not Osama Bin Laden the person that we are dealing with, it is the idea that we can be attacked with impunity.  It is a primitive blood feud, but that seems more impotrant than Iraq ever was. if we had not gone into Iraq and stayed in Afganistan, it would have been sufficient.  

"there have been heady amounts of money on the table for snitching bin Laden out, ever since the Cole bombing." MCorey, Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora is described in Lawrence Wright's book "The Looming Tower:  Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."  We've probably all heard about how the trail for Bin Laden went cold at the end of '01, what was new to me, is that there was a Pakistani villager who spotted him in early '02.  He recognized Bin Laden as the man on the wanted poster.  He was interested in the money, but he didn't have a phone to dial the number.  Score zero for human intelligence.

Rhubarbs, it would be in Iraq's interest to stabilize itself.  Perhaps where there's a will there's a way, but I'm not so sure the Iraqis can do it.  If we walk away from Iraq, I see an unholy alliance formed between Iraqi Shia and the Iranians, and the border with Syria becoming more porous.  Both would have more territory from which to sponsor terror. Pre 2003 Iraq wasn't attacking us but alas we're stuck there defending ourselves against a situation of our own making.  Unless the two factions would cancel out in a terrible humanitarian bloodbath, but not one that would harm our selves or interests.

I am wary of the idea that we can "win hearts and minds" in Waziristan. In the Frontline show I saw, they couldn't even send in a Western journalist - they had to find someone born in Waziristan to go in with a video camera. That doesn't sound like the kind of place receptive to American propaganda. As far as sealing the border, to the extent that this is possible, couldn't we do this from the Afghan side rather than the Paki side? My understanding is that Waziristan is entirely on the Pakistani side of the border (though I guess it's more ambiguous than that - but to the extent it exists on the Afghan side, then, well, we're ALREADY occupying it, just not very effectively).

I think a troop infusion would help; no it would not solve the problems but given how little action we're capable of there, it would certainly make a difference. From there, it's definitely tricky. I suspect that only Pakistan can throw its weight around in Waziristan, where Al Qaeda and Taliban have reasserted themselves.

I'm also wary of this "win over the Taliban" strategy, whereby people are telling us "the Taliban will inevitably be a part of any future Afghanistan." The analogy is made to buying off Sunni chiefs in Afghanistan. But whereas those figures were religious first and foremost, the Taliban strikes me as an ideological outfit, not the sort that can be "won over." To the extent this strategy means "converting" people from the Taliban, OK...weak links associated with the group can probably turn their backs on it. But I don't see how giving the Taliban, AS the Taliban, a cushy place in post-9/11 Afghanistan is a viable strategy. Anybody know why I'm wrong on this?

Charles, I see the Taliban as cloaking their greed, sadism and hunger to power under Islamist slogans and laws, much like the Iranian mullahs.  In other words, they're probably secretly sending their own daughters to top schools while telling women not to work and girls not to learn to read.  I think some Taliban can be won over who aren't as autocratic and see an appealing alternative power structure in American troops.  I certainly don't think they'd have many thoughts about "abandoning Islam," or at least would find it in the Koran to justify their "reversal."

Rhubarb's second paragraph in his last post above is a pretty fair summary of the kind of thinking that has produced the mess in Iraq. In 1991 we had enormous moral justification, near-unanimous domestic support,  half a million pairs of boots on the ground, and the international wind at our backs. The decision taken then was that it was too much trouble to actually win the war--"what's the worst that can happen if we just walk away?".

The answer turned out to be " an unresolved war that implicated us in genocide and perfidy, required massive expenditures and deployments that inflamed the Muslim world (see 9/11), demonstrated our impotence, and virtually destroyed whatever credibility the UN had to re-constitute a reasonable international order in the post-Cold War world, combined with massive oil price-based economic disruptions of incalculable cost."

Iraq is the most strategically important place on Earth. It has the potential to control the region with at least 40% of the planet's petro reserves, and a far greater percentage of those which don't require space program-like expenditures to exploit, which reserves will be vital in avoiding a descent into global chaos during the unknown but probably lengthy interim before oil is no longer the lifeblood of the world economy. It is on the fault line between Shi'ite and Sunni, Persian and Arab, and is the at the very center of the Muslim faith and history. It's population has been in the past and will likely be in the future the leaders of the region with the greatest potential to kick off another holocaust, this time most likely a nuclear one. It is currently the number one test for whether it's preferable to be an ally of the US, and by extension Western Civilization, or an enemy.

Afghanistan is a wild, ungovernable place on the margins of world society with no particular resources that traditionally competes with Bangladesh and Sub-Saharan Africa for the bottom in most measures of development. We promised to eject "The Taliban" which, in terms of their government, we did over five years ago. The idea that our international credibility hangs on our ability to catch one guy who arguably represents less of a threat to actual US interests than our driving habits is hard to accept.