Mark Bowden: The Finish

What is more likely is that the SEALs had no intention of taking bin Laden alive, even though no one in the White House or chain of command issued such an order. Indeed, it would have taken a strong directive to capture him to forgo the chance to shoot him dead. The men who conducted the raid were veterans of many raids, hardened to violence and death. Their inclination would have been to shoot bin Laden on sight, just as they shot the other men they encountered in the compound.

It is worth imagining, however, the alternative scenario. Bin Laden at the defendant’s table before a judge and jury might have been considerably less inspiring to his followers than bin Laden the martyr. He might have proved implacable in interrogation, but often the more powerful, elder figures in an illicit organization are more amenable to compromise than their underlings. If he chose to talk to his interrogators, he possessed more information than anyone about al Qaeda, its organization and finances, its personnel and methods, its history and ideology, its ongoing projects. Having him in custody would have posed legal and political challenges, but as the president explained to me, he felt such a coup might have worked to his benefit. So as satisfying as it was for millions of Americans to learn that the world’s most notorious terrorist was dead, and that his last sight on Earth was of a Navy SEAL leveling an automatic rifle, a live de-mythologized bin Laden might well have been a better outcome.

The documents seized at the compound revealed bin Laden to be a determined and hectoring correspondent, still dreaming of mass murder in America, but also clearly isolated, frustrated, and out of touch with his group’s remaining capabilities. The currents of history had left him behind; he just hadn’t accepted it yet.

All in all, these efforts to massage the facts about the killing of bin Laden were nothing on the order of President Bush’s showboat landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, and his speech beneath the giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, which set a standard for presidential hotdogging that will long stand and will no doubt embarrass Bush until his dying day. In that case the mission—the U.S. invasion of Iraq—was still decidedly unaccomplished, and would remain so for another long and bloody eight years. In his memoir Decision Points , Bush suggests that the message conveyed by that event was not the one intended, but nevertheless concludes: “It was a big mistake.”

There was nothing on that scale from the Obama White House. Nevertheless, its handling of success illustrates the folly of straining to take credit. Harry Truman said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” The flip side of that observation ought to be: “It is amazing how much credit flows to the deserving who don’t claim it.”

Obama has apparently received lasting credit from the American people. His poll numbers jumped almost 10 percentage points after his Sunday evening announcement, and a year later had leveled off to a point slightly higher than where they were before. Killing bin Laden did diminish the perception of Obama as inauthentic, despite the efforts of his Republican opponents. The president’s popularity remained high even among those who were disappointed in his policies. It also took away any hopes they had of portraying him as a pacifist. Having ended America’s military involvement in Iraq and begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he might have been vulnerable to charges of “softness” on national security. Killing bin Laden placed Obama’s commander in chief credentials on secure footing. It boldly underscored his punishing pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership. Even as this effort spread to Yemen, the number of terror attacks attributed to al Qaeda’s various franchises has declined steadily. By 2012 the United States was increasingly targeting midlevel fighters, and the overall number of U.S. drone strikes steadily fell. There is no way to know for sure, but the numbers suggest a dwindling number of targets. U.S. intelligence capabilities have not themselves diminished.

Three days after the raid, in an interview on 60 Minutes, the president said, “It was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my presidency, but I think for the United States since I’ve been president. Obviously bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism, but a mass murderer who had eluded justice for so long, and so many families who had been affected I think had given up hope. And for us to be able to definitively say, ‘We’ve got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who has been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world,’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.”

Killing bin Laden was not a feat of leadership comparable to launching armies across the English Channel or staring down Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War, but it was a clear military victory in an age that produces few of them. For Americans, it supplied the right hard ending to the story of 9/11, and will likely mark the symbolic end of al Qaeda, if not the real one. The organization itself was already reeling when its founder died, as much from the unfolding revolutions in the Arab world as the constant pounding of American drones and special operators, which is why bin Laden’s death, or martyrdom, did not act as a spur to recruitment. Whatever romantic appeal his cause once had, and it never had that much, has been superseded. The popular election of Islamist governments in Egypt and Tunisia may worry the West, but the ability to effect change through legitimate means has undercut the pull of violent extremism. Bin Laden himself was wrestling with this problem in the weeks before his death. The group’s methods had already alienated it from even like-minded Muslims. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s new leader, was still at large in mid-2012, but he exhibits little of the talent to inspire or organize.

Almost a year later, the president told me, “I think, internationally, it reminded the world that the American military is head and shoulders above anybody else, and that we can do things really well that nobody else can do. I think it reminded the American people that there are at least aspects of our government that can do things really well, and that when we put our mind to something we can pull together and fulfill our commitments.

“When I went up to New York for that small ceremony after bin Laden was killed, to talk to those guys at the fire station who had lost half their unit, and to meet with the children of those who had been killed in 9/11, and the widows and the widowers, and to just understand how fully they appreciated that America hadn’t forgotten about them and what happened, the feelings were profound. The mission created some difficulties for us. I think it strained our relations with Pakistan, and we already had strained relations there, and so laid bare this tension, the fact that there are still safe havens inside the country. And so managing that has been a challenge over the last year. But this is one of those times where you make a decision, you’re not sure that it’s going to work out and, in retrospect, you can say that it did work out.”

America’s troubled relationship with Pakistan badly worsened for a time, and then worsened still more after a “friendly fire” incident in November 2011 killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. But the relationship, which, as Hillary Clinton noted, has long been based more on mutual need than on friendship and trust, has endured. In return for many U.S. dollars, Pakistan reopened supply routes to U.S. forces in Afghanistan in July 2012, and American drone strikes in Waziristan continued.