Obama's manhunt

James Robbins:

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... How could we have not found these characters by now? North Waziristan, where the top al Qaeda leaders are reportedly hiding, is 1817 square miles of mountains populated by 361,000 people. That makes it somewhat smaller and much hillier than Delaware. You would think with the technical and human means at our disposal we could have sorted the problem out by now. It’s nice to imagine that all it would take to accomplish the mission is to send in some special operators to slap on the yellow restraints and drag the perps back to face justice. I see Dog the Bounty Hunter playing a key counterterrorism role in the Obama administration.

Of course there is always the possibility of failure. Take Operation Eagle Claw — a.k.a. “Desert One” — the 1980 Iranian Hostage rescue mission. Five and a half months of planning and training were done in by mechanical failures and unexpected bad weather causing two helicopters to lose their way. In the wake of the mission abort a helicopter collided with a C-130, killing eight; in the rush to evacuate the area documents were left behind identifying US intelligence operatives inside Iran. So yes, these kinds of missions can be mounted in non-permissive environments, but if they don’t work out they can help bring down one’s presidency, as President Carter learned.

The decision not to go ahead with the 2005 mission was regrettable — assuming it would have succeeded, that is. But Senator Obama’s umbrage notwithstanding, that was not the end of the game. Instead we chose to fight smarter rather than harder. Over the next two years there followed a series of much less risky missile strikes on the same type of targets. On May 7, 2005, high-ranking al Qaeda operative Haitham al-Yemeni was taken out by a Hellfire missile attack in North Waziristan. On December 4, 2005, Hamza Rabia, reportedly al Qaeda's #3, met the same fate. On January 13, 2006, four al Qaeda operatives were eliminated in a similar manner in Damadola. This attack narrowly missed al-Zawahiri, but killed his son-in-law, Abdul al-Maghribi, who helped run al Qaeda media operations. Al-Zawahiri was again targeted (unsuccessfully) on October 30, 2006, in a missile strike against an Islamic school in Chingai, Pakistan.

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Note that in each case the U.S. was using actionable intelligence (defined as intelligence that triggers the execution of pre-planned defense and security capabilities already identified and enabled). So there is nothing very innovative in saying we will act on that which is actionable; that is U.S. policy. There is also no reason to believe that sending troops rather than missiles in would have led to better outcomes. In fact they would probably have been much worse since the U.S. would have had to explain not only the failure to take down the intended target, but also the incursion itself.

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Militaries are good at breaking things and killing people and taking real estate. As bounty hunters, not so much. As Robbins points out missing the target because he left early is understandable when you are firing Hellfire missiles. Getting troops in place to do a snatch and grab is even more difficult and the explanation for failure becomes politically complicated on two continents. It could happen. The Israelis did a masterful raid on Entebbe. But, they had the advantage of an enemy in a fixed location with few means of departure. There is a reason why the enemy is so transient in Pakistan. He is too weak to stay in the open.