George Stephanopoulos got an interesting, but ultimately unsurprising, admission from Defense Secretary Robert Gates yesterday on This Week. Using John Kerry’s Tora Bora report as a springboard, Stephanopoulos asked Gates whether the Pakistanis have done enough to find Osama bin Laden, and whether we know where he is. Gates made the rather obvious point that we’d have gotten bin Laden ourselves if we knew where he was, but also that we haven’t had decent intel on his location for “years”:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates conceded Sunday that it’s been “years” since the U.S. government has known where Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden is hiding.
“Well, we don’t know for a fact where Osama Bin Laden is,” Gates said flatly on ABC’s “This Week.”
“If we did, we’d go get him.”
Asked when the last time was that the U.S. had any good intelligence on the whereabouts of the terrorist thug behind the 9/11 attacks, Gates said: “I think it’s been years.”
The stark admission came after reports last week of a Taliban detainee in Pakistan who claimed Bin Laden had been in Afghanistan earlier this year.
Again, this hardly comes as a shock. We’ve certainly shown no hesitance in dropping missiles on known Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, which outrages the Pakistanis but which have increased on Barack Obama’s watch — and rightfully so. Clearly we have assets in Pakistan for this kind of work, and just as clearly, those assets would get sent in a heartbeat to Casa Osama as soon as we find it. Our intel on other aspects of AQ and the Taliban have been improving, but not on the one man Americans want captured.
Capturing or killing bin Laden would be a big victory for the US, but it wouldn’t end the war, nor should it. The problem goes far beyond Osama as a leader; even taking out his partner Ayman al-Zawahiri would only dent the problem, not end it. We need to not just kill or capture those leaders, but discredit extremism enough so that new leaders don’t appear. That’s what McChrystal’s COIN strategy hopes to accomplish — if given enough time and resources to succeed.
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