What Has Bin Laden's Killing Wrought?

This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

After the U.S. troops entered the main building housing bin Laden, they assumed people they encountered might be armed, the U.S. officials said. According to this account, a second "courier" was killed inside the house as he was believed to be preparing to fire. One of bin Laden's sons who reportedly lunged toward the attackers was killed, too. Upon reaching the third-floor room where bin Laden was, the U.S. team spotted him within reach of an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol, the U.S. officials said. The commandos then shot and killed him and wounded a woman, apparently one of his wives.

It is, of course, difficult to second-guess the split-second decisions of commandos on a dangerous nighttime mission as to whether there was a reasonable prospect of taking bin Laden alive or whether he did constitute a lethal threat. But their rules of engagement clearly were to shoot first and ask questions later. As CIA Director Leon Panetta explained in TV interviews, the commandos were authorized to kill bin Laden on sight, although they were prepared to accept his surrender if there was no sign of resistance. Put differently, the orders were to "kill or capture" rather than "capture or kill." And the   "kill" option appeared to be the favored choice.

Obama himself suggested that priority in his Sunday address, disclosing that at the start of his presidency, he ordered Panetta "to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network."

Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, has come a long way in accepting the frame of reference created by his predecessor who smirked at the niceties of international law and whose White House counsel Alberto Gonzales mocked the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete."

As details of the bin Laden raid -- and then the corrected details -- spill out over the next several days, it is hard to predict the reaction in the Muslim world, and particularly in nuclear-armed Pakistan, where the targeted killing took place. Extremists of all stripes may be given extra incentive to upend governments that acquiesce to American violations of their sovereignty. There are also heightened dangers of anti-U.S. terrorist attacks.

In Pakistan, where U.S. drone strikes against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have been a major bone of contention, the bin Laden assault has already increased the turbulence in U.S.-Pakistani relations. According to both governments, Obama chose not to inform President Asif Ali Zardari until the night-time raid was finished, apparently fearing that Pakistani authorities might tip off the bin Laden compound. Only after the fact did Obama reach Zardari by telephone to let him know what had just gone down.

The Pakistani government responded with a stern official statement of the obvious, that the "unilateral" attack had violated Pakistan's "sovereignty." But there was embarrassment, too, that the world's most hunted terrorist had been found living in a million-dollar compound just down the road from Pakistan's top military academia and a military base. That fact set -- and the history of Pakistan's chief intelligence agency, the ISI, playing double games regarding Islamic extremism -- were factors in Obama's decision to go it alone, Panetta suggested in an interview with Time magazine.

"It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission," the CIA director said. "They might alert the targets."

Still, the impression of the U.S. running roughshod over the Pakistani government will make it more difficult for senior Pakistani military and government officials to cooperate -- or even pretend to cooperate -- with the U.S. war across the border in Afghanistan. Zardari is already in a peck of trouble. His very position as president is in jeopardy. That means Zardari will be under still more pressure to demonstrate his independence of Washington at a time when Pakistanis perceive they have been subjected to a string of indignities, even preceding the high-profile controversy over the bin Laden raid.

Whether or not the Pakistani military decides to allow President Zardari to remain in office, many Pakistanis are likely to react strongly against the U.S. at a time when bilateral relations are already at their nadir. Since Sunday, many U.S. officials have harshly criticized Pakistan for harboring bin Laden, with some suggesting major cuts in U.S. aid, which has totaled about $20 billion over the past decade. For its part, Pakistan can retaliate by blocking the resupply of U.S. and NATO forces along roads to the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan. This extremely long logistics line may well prove the Achilles heel of the entire U.S. war effort. No one knows this better than the Pakistanis who have already shown themselves ready to use the leverage afforded by NATO's dependence on the difficult supply line.

In favoring killing over capture, it also appears that the United States passed up the prospects of questioning bin Laden about al-Qaeda in favor of killing him, all the better to avoid the messy legal complications of how to proceed against him. Yet, there are commonly accepted legal ways to capture and bring such people to a court of law -- yes, even violent "bad guys" like Osama bin Laden. It is difficult -- especially given the complexities with Pakistani authorities and the risks involved in grabbing a dangerous target -- but it can be done.

That bin Laden might have had extremely valuable information to impart to interrogators is a no-brainer. But some of that information also might have been embarrassing to important elements of the U.S. government, especially considering his longstanding relationship with the CIA going back to the 1980s and the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Much as some prominent U.S. officials breathed a sigh of relief when Iraq's deposed dictator Saddam Hussein was hanged in 2006 -- avoiding a thorough investigation that might have exposed unwelcome secrets dating back to the 1980s -- some operatives from the same period probably are glad that bin Laden's secrets are now buried at sea. Yet, despite the future risks for the United States and the Muslim world -- and the fact that the U.S. assault was a fairly clear violation of international law -- the killing of bin Laden paradoxically does offer a possible route back from the institutionalization of American lawlessness.

Since bin Laden and his actions on 9/11 created the shock that allowed the Bush administration to lead the United States into the "dark side" of "enhanced interrogations," "preemptive wars" and a wholesale assault on civil liberties, it could follow that the death of bin Laden will permit a retracing of those steps. The first step in that journey would be a serious attempt to negotiate a political settlement in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of American and NATO troops. If enough public pressure is brought to bear, there could even be a full-scale reassessment of U.S. priorities focusing on what economists call "opportunity costs."

Only with strong grass-roots pressure, including nonviolent civil disobedience when appropriate, will there be any real hope that the demon of "terrorism" periodically resurrected by the politicians can be exorcised. That, in turn, could bring an early end to the squandering of $2 billion a week into the stalemate in Afghanistan; the allocation of those resources to job creation and educational opportunity for tens of millions of Americans; and stanching the alarming erosion of the liberties the Constitution was carefully crafted to guarantee and the President solemnly sworn to enforce.

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).