ABSTRACT

It is telling that the most definitive success to date in America’s war in Afghanistan became a source of political contention. The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US special operations forces on May 2, 2011, was the clearest fulfillment of President George W. Bush’s pledge (2001) “to find those responsible” for the 9/11 attacks “and bring them to justice.” It was also the achievement most clearly aligned with President Barack Obama’s strategy to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat the al Qaeda terrorist network. After Americans took to the streets to celebrate the news, however, arguments that had become a familiar feature of the war’s discourse resumed. Officials backtracked on initial reports in which they had suggested that bin Laden and his supporters offered heavy opposition and used women as human shields during the raid, which killed three men and a woman in addition to the terrorist leader (Booth 2011). Experts debated whether the United States should provide photographic evidence of bin Laden’s corpse and its burial at sea, with Obama finally opposing the move as triumphalism that would incite further violence (Montopoli 2011). Relations between the United States and Pakistan were challenged by a high-profile American military operation on Pakistani soil and the revelation that bin Laden had been living in relative comfort in close proximity to the Pakistan Military Academy (Gall and Schmitt 2011). The following year, members of Congress and some former military officers accused the White House of leaking details of the raid in an effort to burnish the president’s reputation in an election year (Shane 2012). A book by a former SEAL who took part in the operation contradicted some details of the White House’s account while provoking condemnation from defense officials concerned about the possible release of classified information (Whitlock 2012; Ackerman 2012). Although these developments frayed the edges of the event’s legitimacy, national security elites pointed to the raid as a politically plausible alternative to a counterinsurgency doctrine that had asked too much of policymakers and the public. Despite the distaste for nation building that Bush expressed in the 2000 election, his administration launched two wars aimed at passively or actively transforming the security, governance, and economic health of badly broken states. As a candidate in 2008, Obama had considered Afghanistan “a war that

we have to win,” and proposed a comprehensive and implicitly long-term strategy for doing so (Obama 2008). By the time Obama approached re-election in 2012, America’s experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq undercut the premise that US-backed intervention against terrorists required US-led rebuilding efforts to stabilize potential safe havens. The official break with COIN was formalized in January 2012 with strategic guidance and budget proposals that promoted border-spanning intelligence, air, naval, and special operations capabilities at the expense of the large numbers of ground troops needed for sustained stability operations on a national scale (White House and US Department of Defense 2012). The president’s advisors began emphasizing the narrowed scope of his security ambitions. A June 2012 New Yorker preview of Obama’s second-term priorities, informed by a number of interviews with administration officials, summed up the conventional wisdom on a shift in strategy:

The Obama project of the first four years was to end the two wars it had inherited and move the US away from defining itself globally in terms of a multigenerational struggle against terrorism. Instead of conducting massive land wars, Obama’s terrorism policy became defined by targeted assassination of Al Qaeda leaders by teams of Navy SEALs and Predator drones.