Gregg Easterbrook

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq citing two justifications: to depose Saddam Hussein and to destroy Iraq’s banned weapons program. Within a year, Hussein and his accomplices were imprisoned, and it had been discovered there was no Iraqi banned weapons program. Having achieved its goals, why didn’t the United States leave? Seven years later, this question haunts the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, citing two justifications: to find Osama bin Laden, and break up al Qaeda. Bin Laden is now dead, and al Qaeda broken.

So why doesn’t the United States leave?

By autumn, American forces will have spent a full decade in Afghanistan — conducting patrols, bombing the heinous, bombing the innocent. The United States has roughly 100,000 soldiers and air crew in Afghanistan, almost as many as the peak force in Iraq. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan constrains the Taliban, and the Taliban are an awful group. But the Taliban are a central Asian problem afflicting Afghanistan and Pakistan — their existence does not in any way threaten the United States’ national interest.

Having fulfilled its goals in Afghanistan, why doesn’t the United States leave?

Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, writes in the Wall Street Journal that, “Since 9-11, al-Qaeda has never had more than a few dozen fighters inside Afghanistan at any given time.” Boot is a hardliner — he supports the Afghanistan war, and is author of the 2003 book Savage Wars of Peace, a spirited defense of superpower engagement in low-level conflicts. Boot also thinks there are terrorist groups other than al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

But with bin-Laden dead, how could “a few dozen fighters” and miscellaneous criminal bands justify keeping 100,000 American military personnel, plus 40,000 NATO military personal, in Afghanistan? Justify the continuing violation of Afghan sovereignty? The United States has never declared war on Afghanistan — we just attacked.

Most important, how can the United States justify continuing to kill civilians in Afghanistan? U.S. and NATO forces may not intend to kill Afghan civilians. To the dead, it’s all the same.

After the al Qaeda attack on the United States, the United States counterattack on Afghanistan could be rationalized as self defense. With bin Laden dead, that rationale fades away. To think that any country that harbors scattered bands of bad people should be invaded and methodically bombed by the United States is madness.

So with bin Laden gone — why don’t we leave Afghanistan?

When Barack Obama became president, the United States had about 70,000 soldiers and air crew in Afghanistan. Obama promised the Afghanistan “surge,” which raised the force level, would end in summer 2011. So even before bin Laden was killed, U.S. forces were expected to begin leaving Afghanistan around now. Instead, the White House and Defense Department are saying combat forces will remain in Afghanistan perhaps until 2014.

That would be 14 years of occupation — thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands of Afghans dead — in order to accomplish what? In order to demonstrate U.S. muscle flexing, and to postpone the moment when Western forces leave Afghanistan in worse condition than they found it. With bin Laden dead, the time has come to end American military adventurism in Afghanistan — can U.S. forces on the ground there even describe what they are now fighting for? — and begin Afghan reconstruction.

What follows are a few notes on the bin Laden raid, which your columnist thinks was moral and which I defended here on the BBC:

Those “stealth helicopters.” Radar evasion — which is debatable for a helicopter — had little, if anything, to do with their use. Two Black Hawks with stealth features, trailed by two Chinooks, flew toward bin Laden’s compound. The Chinook, a 1960s design, has no stealthy features: on radar screens, it looks like a flying barn. So the presence of the Chinooks would have betrayed the stealth helicopters to radar operators.

The reason for the “stealth” helicopters is that they make less noise than standard rotary aircraft, aiding the element of surprise. No helicopter is quiet: the Pakistani press reported people in Abbottabad left their houses to see what all the helicopter noise was. “Stealth” helicopters are merely loud, rather than ear-splitting. Also the stealth Black Hawk has infrared shielding, in case Pakistani forces fired heat-seeking missiles, which didn’t happen.

Why didn’t the Pakistani military respond to a 40-minute raid near its capital? One reason is that the Pak military is not exactly a well-oiled machine: the Russian fleet approaching Tsushima Strait in 1905 is the right analogy. This is something to think about when pondering that Pakistan’s army must protect atomic bombs. Another reason is that Pakistan’s defense net points east, toward India. The raiders approached from the west, from Afghanistan.

It also may be that the United States was “spoofing” Pakistani radars and communications: causing the raiding helicopters to disappear electronically, without “jamming” (producing static and systems failures), which would announce something unusual was happening. Don’t be surprised if it turns out one or more U.S. electronic warfare aircrafts were in Pakistani airspace that night, spoofing Islamabad’s national security net. And don’t be surprised if it turns out that U.S. ground-attack aircraft, including this heavily armed plane, specialized to fire on advancing soldiers, were above Pakistan in case the raid went south.

Why wasn’t the V-22 used? The Pentagon has spent at least $30 billion on the V-22 tilt-rotor, which is newer and more advanced than the Black Hawk helicopter. The V-22 was designed for a mission profile like the bin Laden raid — fly a long distance through hostile airspace at twice the speed of a helicopter, land and take off like a helicopter, fly back at twice helicopter speed. Yet the V-22 wasn’t used. Though operational since 2007, the V-22 has never been employed near hostile forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

This aircraft had a poor safety record in testing, and has been cited by Defense Secretary Robert Gates as an example of procurement waste. If it wasn’t right for the bin Laden raid, the V-22 will never be right. Either the lack of V-22 use was inter-service rivalry of the silliest kind (Navy SEALS staged the mission, the V-22 is operated by the Marines and the Air Force) or the V-22 is a very expensive dud that needs to be canceled before any more taxpayer money is wasted.

Photos, top to bottom: Farmer Jalaluddin, 70, carries harvested vegetables past the compound where U.S. Navy SEAL commandos reportedly killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad May 5, 2011. Pakistan, in apparent reference to old rival India, said on Thursday any country that tried to raid its territory in the way U.S. forces did to kill Osama bin Laden would face consequences from its military. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro; Part of a damaged helicopter is seen lying near the compound after U.S. Navy SEAL commandos killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, May 2, 2011. REUTERS/Stringer

Should the United States have invaded Iraq? Should the United States be bombing Libya? These are troubling questions. But there is no question the United States had a right to kill Osama bin Laden — and no doubt his death is good news, including for the world’s Muslims, most of whom are law-abiding and peace-loving.

Bin Laden led an organization that attacked civilians in the United States and several other nations. Under international law, under all ethical and most religious reasoning, the United States had a clear right of self-defense regarding bin Laden and al Qaeda. Pakistani national sovereignty may have been violated, which is an issue for Washington and Islamabad to work out. But the killing itself was self-defense. No serious person — and no school of thought — should object.

Some time may pass before important details are known. From initial reports, these thoughts come to mind:

The raid was honorable. Bombers could have dropped GPS-guided bombs from 50,000 feet, without any American being in danger. But that might have killed many bystanders, and the world would never have been sure who was under the rubble. By sending commandos in for a face-to-face fight, the United States chose the tactics that would limit Pakistani casualties, and be sure U.S. soldiers were shooting at the right person.

We may never know the identities of the special force members on the raid. They did the honorable thing — risking their own lives to spare bystanders.

Killing, rather than capture, was correct. There existed no doubt about bin Laden’s guilt, since he himself regularly proclaimed it. Killing him — Reuters is reporting the commandos were ordered to kill, not capture — avoided a trial that could have been a terrorism trigger. Plus, huge amounts of money would have been spent guarding a captured bin Laden. Better to spend the money building schools in Afghanistan.

His followers’ personal vow is now broken. One reason Nazi Germany refused to surrender long past the point its position was hopeless was that Wehrmacht members took an oath of allegiance not to German patriotism but to Hitler personally. Until Hitler was dead, many German military personnel felt duty-bound to honor their vows even if that meant following the orders of an obvious madman. As soon as Hitler was gone, the oaths dissolved and German forces surrendered.

Al Qaeda members take oaths not to any nation or any vision, but to bin Laden personally. Now he’s gone. True, some al Qaeda members may vow obedience to some new murderer. But others, released from their oaths, may leave al Qaeda.

Surely the United States did not tell Pakistan this was about to happen. Though bin Laden is hated by many in Pakistan’s government — al Qaeda has killed more Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan than Christians and Jews in the United States — there are also fanatics in Pakistani intelligence.

As described by Lawrence Wright in his book The Looming Tower, they warned bin Laden about the 1998 American attempt against him. Likely they would have warned bin Laden again.

Pakistani intelligence officials now look like dolts. Bin Laden was directly under their noses — in a pleasant “hill station” town favored by wealthy Pakistani generals and retired military and “just a few hundred meters from Pakistan’s version of the West Point military academy“. Yet Pakistani intelligence either was too dull-witted to notice, or corrupt and knew and said nothing. Had Pakistan brought bin Laden to justice without the help of the U.S., Islamabad would now seem super-competent, and be winning the world’s praise. Instead, Islamabad seems like a ship of fools.

This killing is irrelevant to the targeted-assassination debate. A few days ago, the United States tried to kill Muammar Gaddafi, using bombs. U.S. law forbids the targeted killing of heads of state, making the U.S. airstrike troubling on many levels: among them that American law makes it legal to kill the innocent when bombs miss, so long as no named individual was targeted. That’s tormented ethics, to put it mildly.

But bin Laden was not a head of state, he was a stateless criminal and an obvious threat to the lives of others. There’s no legal concern here.

Was the raid truly perfect? President Obama’s declaration that U.S. commandos “took care to avoid civilian casualties” could mean many things. The White House should clarify immediately.

The correspondents dinner. Saturday night, Obama was yukking it up at the White House Correspondents Dinner — knowing the raid was about to happen, and the situation for America was about to get either a lot better or a lot worse. The president smiled his way through the dinner (arguably the single most ridiculous aspect of contemporary Washington politics), giving no hint. That’s Academy Award acting.

There were no leaks. Nobody in the White House, the Department of Defense or the intelligence community leaked anything. State Department personnel were evacuated from Peshawar in the hours before the raid, and not one of them texted or tweeted the slightest hint. America really can do something properly!

At this time, no one should think of politics. But President Obama can be forgiven for knowing that his reelection odds just skyrocketed.