Osama Who?

This column from Smerconish appeared both at HuffPo and in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday.

After my boys recently requested new targets for paintball in the backyard, I found myself online, ordering a 25-pack of Osama bin Laden likenesses for $19.97. They arrived last week, on the same day as reports of an al-Qaeda resurgence in Pakistani training camps. Seems bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still alive, and apparently not the irrelevancy we had hoped, six years removed from 9/11.

As I stood opening the cylinder containing the terrorist's image, one of my sons asked what had become of the mastermind of the plot that killed 3,000. I found myself parroting the usual lines about the difficulty of finding one man amid rugged terrain. But the more my son prodded, the angrier I became.

By the way, in case anyone missed it yesterday, Prof Marcus had some words on Smerky and the whole paintball thing with his kids that I thought were interesting.

Because I no longer believe we are hunting bin Laden. Worse, no one seems to care. What happened to the days when a suburban soccer mom would have yearned to strangle bin Laden or Zawahiri with her bare hands?

That sentiment is still very much alive, Smerky. And even if it weren’t, whose fault is that? The soccer moms?

To what passes for our presidential “leadership,” bin Laden is the guy who shows up once every great while when Dubya needs some kind of a spike in the polls (assuming that still possible at this point, and it isn’t) with some video from his Undisclosed Location, if you will, making his cowardly threats. And absolutely nothing more than that.

We've been told bin Laden fled from the battle in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan into Pakistan. We know that last September, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf reached an accord with tribal leaders that gave them continued free rein. Since July, we've known that late in 2005 the CIA disbanded Alec Station, the secret FBI/CIA unit dedicated to finding bin Laden. Sounds discouraging? There's more.

In October, I was one of 45 civilians invited to the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, an incredible, one-week military-immersion program sponsored by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Our focus was the Cent-Com region, comprising 27 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

We traveled 15,000 miles in one week and visited Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Djibouti. We drove a 10-kilometer obstacle course for humvees on the Kuwait/Iraq border, boarded (by helicopter) the USS Iwo Jima in the Persian Gulf, and took turns firing advanced weaponry in 120-degree sands. We received military briefings from leaders that included Rumsfeld, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the vice admiral of Cent-Com.

Extraordinary in their detail, the briefings were notable for what was missing - any mention of bin Laden. I later described him as the Lord Voldemort of the trip - He Who Shall Not Be Named.

When I asked repeatedly about what we were doing to find him, I was always assured that the hunt continues. But I don't buy it.

Deep inside a command center in Doha, Qatar, I found myself in a hangarlike building, watching war in real time. To my left, on an array of giant screens, I watched our military air activity over Iraq, as well as ground images from unmanned predators. Fox News was also on. On my right, it was Afghanistan, plus a live feed of CNN.

Both maps showed a beehive of activity. Lots of aircraft, plenty of movement. I noted that the activity in Afghanistan was heavily concentrated on its border with Pakistan. But there, all the action stopped. Pakistan, including the north Waziristan region where bin Laden is presumed to be hiding, was devoid of any military presence, at least on the map.

I'd like to think that, unseen, were the movements of some Pat Tillman-type heroes combing the rugged terrain of Pakistan, paying off the locals, cutting deals, using sophisticated spy gear, and doing whatever is necessary to find and kill bin Laden and Zawahiri.

But I doubt it.

Uh, Smerky, I’d watch it with the Pat Tillman references if I were you (this provides more, including this excerpt about Tillman’s death)…

Dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs obtained by The Washington Post show that Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader, and negligent shooting by pumped-up young Rangers -- some in their first firefight -- who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.

The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.

Army commanders hurriedly awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor and released a nine-paragraph account of his heroism that made no mention of fratricide. A month later the head of the Army's Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., called a news conference to disclose in a brief statement that Tillman "probably" died by "friendly fire." Kensinger refused to answer questions.

Back to Smerky…

Instead, I suspect we are completely reliant on Musharraf, who is willing to do only as much as guarantees him the continued support of America, but not enough to undermine his tenuous hold over his nation's tribal leaders. During my trip, I questioned senior military leaders about my suspicion.

One was quick to use the word sovereignty in his reply before describing the search as "difficult and nuanced."

No disrespect to our military, but I thought Bushco “didn’t do nuance,” like that brie-eating, Botox-injecting (joke, I think) liberal John Kerry.

Another told me the hunt was the equivalent of finding one man in the Rockies. Several asked me what would happen if they did find him, insinuating that support for the war in Iraq would further dissipate if that were to occur.

I'm not blaming our military. But if I am correct that bin Laden is in Pakistan and not the subject of an aggressive hunt, our political leadership is at fault for not freeing the hands of our soldiers to find him.

Names, Smerky! WHO in political leadership?

Oh, right…the Repugs have been running the show in Washington for most of this wretched Iraq war, so you can’t name names. Gotcha.

And I fault the media for banging the Iraq drum, but leaving the bin Laden beat silent.

You have got to be kidding me! Again, WHO was it who kept leaking every piece of propaganda on Iraq as part of The Never Ending You Godless Commie Liburul Including That King Of Pork John Murtha Of The Democrat Party War On Terra to our bought-and-paid-for corporate media, who dutifully lapped it up virtually without question?

Besides, every time any news organization with initials made noise, we’d get a leak about how we supposedly captured the No. 2 or No. 3 man in al Qaeda, and that was reported and subsequently forgotten. And that suited Bushco just fine, and you’re as big an enabler of this despotic regime as anyone.

Six years removed from 9/11, and with reports of an al-Qaeda resurgence, it's time to wonder what we've really accomplished and what we do now. Maybe I'm mistaken, but one thing is clear: Whatever we are doing isn't working.

If you believe that, then you should be supporting Democratic efforts to redeploy our troops to an over-the-horizon force in Iraq and concentrate once more in Afghanistan to pick up the hunt some more (of course, our military has been wrecked by Iraq, so I don’t know how feasible redeployment is at this point).

I ran my concerns past Michael Scheuer, former head of Alec Station and author of the best-seller Imperial Hubris. He told me, "Ultimately, we have had neither the focus nor resources to find and capture or kill bin Laden et al., and so almost by default we have had to hope that our Pakistani proxies would come to our rescue. Common sense should have told us that this was never going to occur. Why? Bin laden and his men and the Taliban are heroes to the great majority of Pakistanis - they beat the Soviets and are now beating the Americans - and Pakistani political stability could not survive Musharraf killing the population's heroes."

Which only reinforces my concern that, at this rate, my kids have as much chance of bagging bin Laden in our backyard as Musharraf's men do in the mountains of Pakistan.

It’s actually funny to hear Smerky make some remark that bin Laden is He Who Shall Not Be Named, because that description really applies to Dubya here. There's some interesting stuff in this column (some), but all of what is noted here about the difficulties of finding him and the tenuous leadership situation in Pakistan, among other things, should have been determined and incorporated into policy before the first shot was fired in Iraq.

As I’ve pointed out before, I’m currently working through “State of Denial” By Bob Woodward, and I’m at the point where the war has just started (and unbelievably, the decision of who would be named “viceroy” had not yet been made – I’m curious to find out now exactly where the hell Paul Bremer came from, and I know I’ll find out).

I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and bin Laden has been mentioned once or maybe twice. That’s it. And yes, ratcheting up the pressure on Musharraf to work harder to get bin Laden could get Musharraf killed (and then imagine al Qaeda officially running Pakistan).

That’s the nightmare scenario we should have been preparing for, not Iraq (and Rumsfeld actually told Woodward in a recent interview quoted in the book that they never really believed Saddam Hussein had nukes – the only thing I, for one, care about – but chemical weapons only).

Try “beating the drum” on that, Smerky, as long as you’re blaming “the media.” And if you still find yourself too frustrated when Bushco continues to ignore bin Laden because he’s protected, you and your family can just have another paintball marathon in your back yard since that seems to be your idea of fun (preceded by an episode of “24” to get you in the mood even more, I guess).