President Obama announced on Sunday night that Osama bin Laden is dead. Not just dead — killed by U.S. operatives.
In a “compound” near an area deep inside Pakistan called Abottabad — not far from the capitol of Islamabad — U.S. operatives engaged in a “firefight” with bin Laden’s handlers, Obama said, and killed the terrorist leader. This was no drone strike. It was a “small team” of U.S. operatives, pulling the trigger and delivering what Obama called “justice” on a man responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans.
The operation was the result of eight months of intelligence work, with Obama giving the order to carry out the operation last week. Obama didn’t exactly specify, but it appears bin Laden’s death is the result of a joint operation by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. But Obama said that bin Laden’s body has been recovered.
The Afghanistan war will surely continue. Drone strikes in Pakistan will surely continue. al-Qaida will surely proclaim imminently that it’s merely transitioning into its next phase. But Obama called it the “most significant achievement to date in our effort to defeat al-Qaida.” Killing bin Laden has been the dream of countless U.S. soldiers and intelligence operatives I’ve encountered since 9/11.
Bin Laden’s escape from the U.S. at Tora Bora in 2001 became a potent symbol of American impotence. Since bin Laden reconstituted al-Qaida’s senior leadership in Pakistan, a terrorist cell defined by hijacked religious symbolism and conspiracy theories franchised operations to affiliates from Iraq to Yemen, willing itself into a geopolitical force and killing thousands worldwide. His appearances in years’ worth of audio and videotapes mocked the U.S. and pledged to “bleed it to bankruptcy.”
Starting in 2008, the U.S. massively accelerated attacks from armed Predator drones over the Afghanistan border in Pakistan, killing hundreds. It built an intelligence network in the Pakistani tribal areas, largely from scratch and with — to be charitable — inconsistent assistance from the Pakistani intelligence service. Obama said that the operation couldn’t have happened without Pakistani cooperation.
There’s a longstanding debate in counterterrorism circles about the importance of bin Laden to al-Qaida. For years, al-Qaida theoreticians, chief among them a man known as Abu Musab al-Suri, have attempted to refashion al-Qaida into a global movement that can outlast bin Laden. al-Qaida’s Yemen branch, in its English language magazine, have discouraged American Muslims from joining the jihad overseas, urging them instead to launch attacks inside the U.S. on their own.
al-Qaida has now sustained two massive blows to its relevance in the past few months. First, the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia refuted al-Qaida’s argument that only violent actions focused on the “far enemy” — the U.S. — could overthrow sclerotic dictatorships. Now bin Laden is dead, without a charismatic figure to take his place. For al-Qaida, it’s show-and-prove time. U.S. counterterrorism officials have to expect attempted retaliatory attacks.
In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — which would have been inconceivable without bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks — the U.S. learned painfully that the death of an organization’s leader doesn’t equate to the death of the organization. al-Qaida in Iraq remains lethal — but at far diminished levels than during the horror years of 2004 to 2006.
But not every decapitation should be understood as “just” a decapitation. It took months of painstaking intelligence work to kill al-Qaida in Iraq’s most potent leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The maintenance of that intelligence acumen; along with al-Qaida’s miscalculations that alienated Iraqis; along with a sustained U.S. military effort — all that led to what’s been a demonstrable attrition of the Iraq chapter of al-Qaida’s global efforts.
While pledging that “we will be relentless in defense of our citizens,” and not indicating that this ten-year-long war against al-Qaida is over, Obama is clearly hoping that the reversals suffered this year by al-Qaida are as durable.
The feeling among the global jihadist community? Online, at least, it’s disbelief. “I will wait for the Mujahideen to confirm this, and will not believe until I see a picture of his dead body,” one Internet extremist writes.
“Most top tier al-Qaida forums have forbidden all discussion about the topic, insisting that they will not allow any more messages until there is official confirmation from Al-Qaida,” says top terrorism watcher Evan Kohlman. “Nonetheless, people are posting dozens of messages praying for the safety and well-being of ‘the Mujahid Shaykh.’”
Update, May 2, 12:40 a.m.: Senior administration officials just offered more detail about the lethal raid on a background conference call with reporters. The operation took under 40 minutes. bin Laden “did resist the assault force,” a senior administration official says, but was shot “as our operators came into the compound.” A woman was used as a human shield but doesn’t appear to have died in the firefight — which can’t be said of bin Laden, one of his adult sons and two “couriers.”
The Pakistanis provided intelligence useful to the raid, the official says, but the Pakistani government didn’t know about it beforehand. The official says it was “conducted [with the] utmost operational security.”
The compound itself, the official says, is about five years old, and believed to have been built to shelter bin Laden — wow, so close to the Pakistani capitol — but it’s unknown how long bin Laden was there.
The U.S. lost one helicopter in the operation, but U.S. officials wouldn’t specify more about it. bin Laden’s body is being “handled in accordance with Islamic practices and traditions.” No word on where it is, or if and when it or pictures of it will be released.
As for the overall importance of the killing, the official calls it a “major, essential step in al-Qaida’s eventual disruption.” Intelligence from the raid indicates that bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, will become the new leader, but his authority isn’t “universally accepted,” and the Egyptian Zawahiri will have difficulty maintaining the loyalty of “al-Qaida’s Gulf Arab followers.” While the official predicts attempted retribution attacks, he further predicts that al-Qaida is on a “path of decline [that's] difficult to reverse.”
Spencer Ackerman @'Wired'
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