Ever since word broke of the death of Osama Bin Laden and the fact that he’d been living in full view of a major Pakistani military facility people have wondered how this was possible. The prevailing (and probably true) view is that the Pakistani military and intelligence community has Bin Laden sympathizers that not only ignore him but aided him. Beyond that a larger element of the Pakistani government and society adopted the ‘easier to ignore than risk the outcry from his supporters’ view.
However as I was driving home from a client meeting the other day a new thought came to mind. I fully concede that this is pure speculation and as I said above I think the prevailing view is likely the right one.
But it is not uncommon for police investigating criminals or intelligence officers investigating spies to allow the suspect to continue to function because more can be gained from watching who comes and goes than would be gained from taking them in right away.
As a number of commentators have already observed, the killing of Bin Laden was to a large degree a symbolic victory. His day to day involvement in AQ operations is murky and while I’m certainly glad to see him gone, I don’t think his death will shut terror down.
So what if we knew he was there for some time, perhaps for a number of years, and we simply decided that leaving him isolated was a better long term strategy than taking him out right away ?
It is entirely possible that over the last 2 or 3 or 5 years we’ve gathered a good deal of intelligence on the leadership of AQ and perhaps even thwarted terror plans because we just watched who came and went.
It may sound silly but if you look at the history of intelligence operations quite often the biggest production came from just sitting and watching.
If this does someday turn out to be true it would be a testament to the true patriotism of President Obama (and President Bush if it goes back that far) for passing up the obvious benefits of a Bin Laden killing in order to gather the intelligence.
Imagine the benefit Obama and the Democrats could have gotten if Bin Laden went in fall 2010 (or by the same token for Bush and the GOP in 2006 or 2008) ?
It is more than likely that this is pure speculation, but wouldn’t it be interesting if it were true ?