What was Osama bin-Laden doing there?

The US grabbed some hard drives when they left. He may still have been orchestrating Al-Qaeda, but I'll wait for the results.

We leave Afghanistan, Pakistan wins, and thats why Osama was there, so that when Pakistan reimposed itself in Kabul, he gets to rebuild his bases again. Mullah Omar is there too and he's waiting in the wings to walk back into Kabul.

It would be pretty devastating if the hard disks turn out to be full of porn.

^^^^ He was hiding in a giant villa a mile way from a military academy.

The entire region is currently in a state of civil war sans Afghan/pakistan, it makes sense for him to hide somewhere stable.

Has anyone considered that most tribal folks typically care about being left the Hell alone to engage in their feuds and small-time squabbles than they value any sort of "infrastructure"?

Trying to civilize tribals by force is a fool's game. They don't want infrastructure, they want to be left to their own devices. Sometimes, they like to plunder, but they typically plunder other nearby tribals.

The tribes may feud, and infrastructure (as built by foreigners, not necessarily infrastructure built by locals, which is a major difference) may not matter to them, but they are also keen on nationalism. They're keen on uniting the traditional Pashtun lands, part of which are in Pakistan. They don't like us propping Pakistan (which seeks to dominate them), and they still haven't forgiven us for propping Pakistan in the 80s either.

This war is ALL about Pakistan.

If we truely want to win over the Pashtun tribes, we should offer to help them reunite their people, which, funnily enough, will also give Kabul control of very prime coastal real estate, so there would be something in it for the Americans as well, for those who want the realpolitik angle.

@Driscoll: I think the thing about Vietnam and ROE is a bit of a canard, really; the crucial issue is that it's hard for a country to win a war when it doesn't consider the cost worthwhile, and I don't think the American public ever did really consider the cost worthwhile. The rules of engagement were an inevitable consequence of the US public's backing for the war being fairly lukewarm at best; they were part of the government's fiction that we weren't in an all-out war in Vietnam, and that fiction was considered necessary to get public support at all.

War is politics, to paraphrase Clausewitz; it does not exist apart from it. It's a cost/benefit analysis thing; certainly, some of the costs and benefits are psychological, not material, but it still is. When a country is as militarily and economically and politically powerful as the US is, almost any war is winnable at sufficient cost. Some costs are not worth it.

He wasn't called the hide-and-seek champion 9 years running for nothin'.

Kinda ingenious really.

Here we are all thinking he's running around in caves like crazy, when instead he was right out in the open. No one would expect that!

I've heard stories (whose accuracy I can't judge) that Pakistan was feeding the US intelligence suggesting OBL was in the lawless tribal areas the whole time; in other words, likely to be active lies. Whether the people "at the top" in Pakistan knew this, I can't know. Certainly I think the odds are astronomically high that some influential people in the Pakistani military and intelligence services knew where he was and didn't tell; I think it very likely that they were involved in hiding him in the first place.

There are several possible motives to that, of course, from outright supporting him to simply wanting to keep him in limbo under their control.

OMG! That means Jimmy Hoffa can only be RUSH LIMBAUGH!

I would have thought that he was in Karachi, but...

Oh man, I am sick of explaining this. He cheated. Dude changed spots and went outside the boundaries. Anne Frank was, and still is, the champ. Joking, obviously.

srs mode:

It seems like Pakistan had plenty of reasons to hide Osama. Use him against India, use him against Afghanistan, use him to get us to keep funding them so we can keep making drone strikes in their territory, etc.

With this in mind, why did it take us so long to check in Pakistan? Surely we didn't believe every bit of intelligence we got from Pakistan when they clearly had some reasons to keep the guy around. Surely master political analysts knew of these reasons far before we got him.

Hell, I'm kinda surprised the CIA wasn't interrogating high level ISI agents.

edited 3rd May '11 6:07:50 PM by deathjavu

Because GWB told them not to look very hard??

That's my slightly cynical suspicion.

My very cynical suspicion is that the CIA set it all up, so their alien overlords could manipulate human development.

^^

Thats because GWB trusted General Musharraf's secular military dictatorship to do the job. And considering that the military regime DID arrest quite a few AQ members, it seemed like a sensible deal at the time to simply delegate to the dictator for cash. Unfortunately, Bush did not count on Musharraf milking the deal so as to arm himself with F-16s against India, or take into account that local political pressures actually meant something, even when the Musharraf regime was flush in American funding.

edited 3rd May '11 7:53:59 PM by FFShinra

@Morven: Indeed, we lost Vietnam because the citizens of the US decided they did not want to win the war because they didn't like the cost. I suppose I value certain ideals higher than other people. But I digress, the point I was arguing was that the idea that the war in Afghanistan is "unwinnable" is false. It is winnable, and so far at a much lower cost than Vietnam. Hell, British and Indian forces lost more guys during the First Anglo-Afghan War than we have.

I dont know how much we would have gained if we 'won' Vietnam.

Its like winning in like...nuclear war. Sure you may 'win' by being the last country standing but is the cost really worth it?

The US did just fine in Vietnam. The Soviet Union lost. The South Vietnamese people lost. But the US? It got the benefit of the USSR spending their industrial production fighting the US.

Somehow that doesn't sound like something that could justify 58,000+ dead.

Well, it(and Afghanistan) is argued to have caused the fall of the Soviet Union, so...yeah, at least it's better than nuclear war.

I am, however, reasonably sure that none of the politicians in charge thought of it that way, so feel free to not give them any credit.

The US's goal during the Vietnam War was to keep South Vietnam from going communist. We failed that objective.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan drained more resources from them than Vietnam did. They lost a lot of high quality equipment fighting against the Mujahideen, in contrast to Vietnam where they mostly just supplied equipment, a lot of which was just obsolete WWII weaponry that the Soviet's weren't going to use anymore. The Chinese were also dumping equipment on North Vietnam until 1970 when they switched to helping the communists in Cambodia, instead. Vietnam also already had quite a bit of weaponry from WWII which was either given to them by the US or captured from the Japanese.

To bring this kind of back on topic, there's a lot of similarity between Ho Chi Minh and Osama bin Laden. We supplied Ho's men in WWII to fight the Japanese, then we fight against them in Vietnam. We supplied Osama's guys to fight the Soviets, then we end up fighting them. Dumping equipment on the third world doesn't seem as hot of an idea in hindsight.

China spent more in Vietnam than the Soviets. Vietnam had little if any effect on the actual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan and Gorbachev were the big factors.

Anyway, isn't this about Osama in Abbottabad?

Obviously he was using a time machine to fix what once went wrong.

Or something.

@Stupid Exclamation Mark

Funny you should say that http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/porn-found-osama-bin-laden-evidence-trove/story?id=13599025