Perhaps, however, America can use this occasion to draw a deep breath and a few pertinent conclusions.
Many salient facts about the tracking of terrorism’s most prolific killer to his lair — not a remote cave but an urban compound — must remain shrouded in secrecy, for now. But one surmise seems reasonable: bin Laden was brought down by intelligence gathering that more resembles excellent police work than a military operation.
Granted, in nations as violent as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the line between military operations and police work is blurry, and military and other forms of intelligence gathering cannot be disentangled.
Still, the huge military footprint in Afghanistan, close to bin Laden’s Pakistan refuge, seems especially disproportionate in the wake of his elimination by a small cadre of specialists.
Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that Gen. David Petraeus has said there are perhaps about 100 al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan. “Did anyone,” Lacey asks, “do the math?” There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every al-Qaida fighter.
There is much more to al-Qaida than bin Laden, and there are many more tentacles to the terrorism threat than al-Qaida and its affiliates. So “the long war” goes on. But perhaps such language is bewitching our minds, because this is not essentially war.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry received much derision for his belief that although the war on terror will be “occasionally military,” it is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.”
The more we couch our thinking in military categories, the more we open ourselves to misadventures like the absurd and deepening one in Libya.
There, our policy began as a no-fly zone to protect civilians. Seven weeks later, our policy is to decapitate the government by long-distance assassination and to intensify a civil war in that tribal society, in the name of humanitarianism.
What makes this particularly surreal is that it is being done by NATO.
Unpack the acronym: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from the Red Army. Its purpose was, in Lord Ismay’s famous formulation, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”
NATO, which could long ago have unfurled a “mission accomplished” banner, is now an instrument of addlepated mischief.
This is an episode of presidential malpractice. Obama has allowed NATO to be employed for the advancement of a half-baked doctrine (R2P — “responsibility to protect”), a quarter-baked rationalization (Hillary Clinton discovered that a vital U.S. national interest required the removal of Moammar Gaddafi because he “is a man who has no conscience”?) and an unworthy national agenda (France’s pursuit of grandeur on the cheap).
When this misadventure is finished, America needs a national debate about whether NATO should be finished. Times change.
George F. Will writes for The Washington Post Writers Group. Email address: georgewill@washpost.com.
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