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In the Corner, Peter Kirsanow calls attention to the service of the Navy’s SEALs.
…That said, the nation once again owes a debt of gratitude to the SEALs, the elite warriors who have distinguished themselves as the tip of America’s spear. Rarely do we hear about their missions and we probably won’t know the identities of those who participated in the raid on bin Laden’s compound.
Whether it was Orwell, Kipling, or Churchill who said, “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” the quote applies to SEALs. It’s appropriate that the last thing bin Laden saw was a rough man with an MP-5.
Mark Hemingway, in the Weekly Standard Blog, with more on the SEAL team.
It’s been reported that bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DevGru. Marc Ambinder has a good report that fills in some of the particulars:
DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code. …
Alana Goodman points out the intel from GITMO that helped us find bin Laden.
The killing of Osama bin Laden seemed to come out of nowhere, but officials have reportedly been on the terror leader’s trail for over four years…And according to the Washington Examiner, it was intelligence gleaned from a Guantanamo Bay detainee over four years ago that ended up leading to his whereabouts:
“Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.” Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago. Two years ago, intelligence officials began to identify areas of Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated, and the great security precautions the two men took aroused U.S. suspicions.”
If it wasn’t for Guantanamo Bay, it seems highly unlikely that the government would have been able to uncover this information. We can thank the counterterrorism policies put in place by the Bush administration—and President Obama’s savvy decision to continue them—for leading intelligence officials to bin Laden.
Mark Steyn comments on the president’s speech.
…Personally, I would have liked bin Laden’s death to have been announced by whatever lowest-level official was manning the night desk at the Department of Nondescript Bureaucrats, preferably reading it off the back of an envelope. But, if you’re going to put the head of state on TV to announce it himself, it would have been better to have been all brisk and businesslike – “At 0800 hours American military assets entered an address at 27b Jihadist Gardens, etc” – and finish off with a bit of Churchillian sober uplift about it not being the end or the beginning of the end but maybe the end of the beginning.
Instead, as Stephen Hunter, the novelist and Washington Post film critic, writes:
“Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.”
Andrew McCarthy discusses the operation in the context of foreign policy and domestic politics.
…President Obama deserves kudos for the vigor with which he has attacked al Qaeda leaders and cells in Pakistan. As I argued during the campaign, his position on the need to do this was far better than that of Sen. McCain — who regarded Pakistan as a valuable ally and portrayed Obama as reckless for threatening to conduct attacks there. Obama is also to be applauded for authorizing yesterday’s daring mission. President Carter’s failed mission to rescue the hostages in Iran is testament to how much can go wrong and how politically devastating it can be when such a mission fails. And all you need to do is read the pertinent section of the 9/11 Commission report about President Clinton’s failure to give clear authorization to kill bin Laden when we had several chances to do so in 1998–99 — i.e., before bin Laden bombed the Cole bombing and ordered 9/11. That it would have been irresponsible to pass up this latest chance to rid the world of this menace does not mean acting responsibly was without risk for Obama. We should commend him for pulling the trigger.
Still, the operation cannot but underscore the mind-bending inconsistencies in Obama’s counterterrorism — gold-plated due process for some 9/11 terrorists but assassination for others; the haste to close Gitmo even as it continues to serve valuable security purposes; the paralysis of interrogation policies that (as Shannen, Steve, and others point out) were key to obtaining intelligence that not only thwarts attacks but enabled us to find bin Laden…
We ought to take this very good news for what it is — very good news. …And we should forget about the politics of this. Whatever bump Obama gets will be about as enduring as tomorrow’s trip to the station to fill ’er up with $5/gallon gas.
Claudia Rosett thinks the White House could have handled the announcement better.
Bin Laden’s death is great news, but the president, in his rush to claim credit, made a mistake in delivering it himself. Osama bin Laden was a pied piper of mass murder, and every effort should be made to avoid in any way dignifying anything about him. Rather than using the presidential pulpit to break the news, President Obama should have left it to one of the U.S. military commanders or spy chiefs whose men took the real risks in this operation. (Recall how President Bush, rather than grabbing the center stage, and thus dignifying the ex-tyrant of Iraq, left it to Paul Bremer to announce the capture of Saddam Hussein.) Obama should have then followed up by explaining the broader context of this war, and putting terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah to Moammar Qaddafi on notice that anyone who attacks or even mortally threatens America, or America’s allies, can expect the same fate.
In the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams comments on the president and what’s ahead.
The spectacular news of Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. forces could not have come at a better time. Al Qaida’s message that violence, terrorism, and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and throughout the Arab lands. Al Qaida and its view of the world are being pushed aside in favor of demands for new governments, free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and an end to corruption. Bin Laden’s death weakens al Qaida and Salafi movements further by taking away their most powerful symbol.
…It is therefore unfortunate that Mr. Obama seems to want more than that fair share the American people will naturally and rightly give him. His remarks last night were far too much laced with words like “I met repeatedly,” “at my direction,” and “I determined,” trying to take personal credit for the years of painstaking work by our intelligence community. Mr. Obama might have noted that this work began under President Bush, but as usual he did not. …
…Al Qaida may redouble efforts to commit acts of terror, but its prestige and power in the Arab world are on the decline. The Administration should turn back now to the cases of Libya and Syria above all, pushing further to end the vicious and violent regimes that rule those countries. As the republics of fear fall, al Qaida’s message will fall further into disrepute and the message of freedom that is now spreading in the Middle East will grow stronger.
In Contentions, Michael Rubin makes a good point about the criticism of Israel’s targeted terrorist killings.
The American team that killed Bin Laden should be congratulated. They have served justice and reminded terrorists that even in an age of national security dementia, they may run, they may hide, but that they won’t be forgotten. Americans are right to celebrate the demise of this mass murderer who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and others.
Much is made in the Middle East of double standards. It doesn’t matter whether the terrorist is Al Qaeda targeting Americans, Europeans, and moderate Arabs, PKK targeting Turks, or Mujahedin al-Khalq targeting Iranians. No terrorist deserves diplomatic immunity or legitimacy’s embrace. All terrorists deserve death. Perhaps it is time for Americans, Europeans, and their media elite to reexamine their most glaring double standards: If Americans can kill a master terrorist targeting civilians then Israel too should be able to target Hamas leaders in Gaza, Damascus, Oslo, or Dubai, wherever they may be.
Christopher Hitchens raises the issue of the foreign aid we’ve been giving Pakistan.
There are several pleasant little towns like Abbottabad in Pakistan, strung out along the roads that lead toward the mountains from Rawalpindi (the garrison town of Pakistani’s military brass and, until 2003, a safe-house for Khalid Sheik Muhammed). Muzaffarabad, Abbottabad … cool in summer and winter, with majestic views and discreet amenities. The colonial British—like Maj. James Abbott, who gave his name to this one—called them “hill stations,” designed for the rest and recreation of commissioned officers. The charming idea, like the location itself, survives among the Pakistani officer corps. If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.
There’s perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There’s some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.
…The martyr of Abbottabad is no more…Yet the uniformed and anonymous patrons of that sheltered Abbottabad compound are still very much with us, and Obama’s speech will be entirely worthless if he expects us to go on arming and financing the very people who made this trackdown into such a needlessly long, arduous and costly one.
Alana Goodman says “dittos” on Pakistan
At this point it is impossible to say whether the Pakistani military was shockingly clueless to the fact that the world’s most notorious terrorist was living in its midst, or whether there was something more sinister going. But we do know that the Obama administration, for whatever reason, declined to tell the Pakistani government about its raid on bin Laden’s compound until after the mission was accomplished.
“We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” said a senior administration official during a briefing with reporters last night. “That was for one reason and one reason alone: We believed it was essential to the security of the operation and our personnel.”
The administration’s decision might be less of an issue if we hadn’t been giving Pakistan $1 billion a year since 9/11 for the specific purpose of helping us capture bin Laden. What exactly was the point of that if we couldn’t even trust the Pakistanis not to compromise the operation?
Max Boot has a range of interesting thoughts on the operation.
The death of Osama bin Laden—richly deserved, long delayed—is certainly cause for celebration. But let’s not get carried away. The organization he built, al Qaeda, is likely resilient enough to continue without him. Certainly many of its regional affiliates, from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, operated largely independently of their titular leader and will continue to do so. Then there are the numerous other Islamist terrorist organizations, such as Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani Taliban, which did not pledge even formal allegiance to “Emir” Osama. His death is an important symbolic blow against the Islamist terrorist network but not a fatal one; at most it might lead to the decline of Al Qaeda and the rise of other, competing organizations.
Some other thoughts on the Big News:
• The raid shows the importance of U.S. bases in Afghanistan—not only for keeping that country out of the clutches of the Taliban and other Al Qaeda allies, but also for projecting U.S. power into Pakistan which, despite bin Laden’s death, will remain a hotbed of radical Islamist activity. If it were not for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, how could Seal Team Six have reached bin Laden’s compound deep in the heart of Pakistan? According to news accounts, they were using Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters, presumably the variants specially modified for special operations. But modified or not helicopters are short-range aircraft. Thus having guaranteed access to bases in Afghanistan is crucial to the success of such missions—as they are for Predator strikes and various intelligence-gathering activities which the CIA and other agencies undertake to monitor the situation in Pakistan. …
In the National Journal, George Condon writes that Obama may feel political pressure to exit Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden’s body had barely hit the water before people were predicting the impact his death would have on the war in Afghanistan, U.S. relations with the Islamic world and President Obama’s reelection campaign. The only problem with these immediate statements is that events are unlikely to work out the way anybody expects right now.
…What soured the public on Bush’s handling of the war was the rise in American casualties—and that is a lesson today for Obama. If voters believe the killing of Osama bin Laden means the war in Afghanistan is won and can be ended, their reaction to continued American deaths could be devastating for Obama.
…Far from helping Obama politically, the latest development could increase the pressure on him to get American troops out of Afghanistan. It will, said Cordesman, “raise new questions about whether the Afghan war can really put an end to al-Qaida and other terrorist sanctuaries and lead some of those who oppose the war to state that the U.S. and its allies should now withdraw.”…