Nine Years On, bin Laden's a Free Man

Nine years ago today, the sun shone in New York City, and people were preparing for a rather normal Tuesday. By lunchtime, no one's day was normal. Four planes had been hijacked, and two crashed into the World Trade Center (which collapsed) and another into the Pentagon. The fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania because the passengers fought back. Usama bin Laden's organization Al Qaeda had struck. He and his murdered 2,977 people, and he has yet to face justice. American and allied policy needs to change, or he'll never hang from a lamppost as he deserves.

The neo-con-artists who hijacked American foreign policy in the wake of the Al Qaeda murders thought the solution was to "drain the swamp." By that, they meant that the US had to deny Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers a safe haven anywhere and everywhere in the world. As a result, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was targeted for removal, replaced by the Northern Alliance with help from US special forces and the CIA. Then, policy turned to building up Afghanistan before the whole thing fell apart as the Bush administration's attention wandered to Iraq-Nam.

The closest that justice ever got to bin Laden was at Tora Bora, where he was holed up in December 2001. The US outsourced the battle to the Afghans, who negotiated a truce while Al Qaeda was supposed to surrender it weapons. Instead, they escaped. Former CIA office Gary Bentsen says that he had bin Laden's exact location and that if US Central Command had committed the troops he requested, the Al Qaeda leader would have been a prisoner.

Still, the US and its allies are fighting the Taliban and trying to create a central government in Afghanistan that can enforce its orders beyond the suburbs of Kabul. Mr. Obama condemned the war in Iraq-Nam as a "dumb war." The fighting in Afghanistan is the right war being fought in the wrong way, and that, too, is dumb.

American forces are facing perhaps 100 hardcore Al Qaeda in the area. These are the CIA's figures. That is not an army. That is a mafia family; the Lucchese family in New York has 100 made men. The Five Families of New York outnumber Al Qaeda 4 or 5 to 1. Al Qaeda must be fought in the same way. Their funds need to be cut off, starting with the opium money. Their leadership needs to be taken prisoner or killed. But just because John Gotti worked Queens and Brooklyn, there was no cause for the US Army to deploy at Coney Island en masse.

Whether the Karzai government survives is irrelevant to the long-term interests of the US. Putting Usama bin Laden in jail or the morgue is. The Bush administration started the war in the right way, but eventually, it lost its way. The Obama administration has started implementing a strategy to extricate the NATO troops from the mess it inherited, but it runs the risk of thinking that the strategy is right. It is not.

Instead, 5,000 US troops should be marauding through southern Afghanistan, not taking territory and trying to hold it, but rather hunting down the vermin. Crossing the border into Pakistan should happen in cases of hot pursuit as per international law. And this should continue until UbL's head is on the end of a stick. This is a manhunt for a criminal, no more and no less. And thus far, it has been a failure.

© Copyright 2010 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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