What Did We Get for 381 U.S. Dead Since the Death of bin Laden?
Posted: 05/ 2/2012 - Robert Naiman
President Obama went to Afghanistan and made a speech celebrating an agreement between the United States and Afghanistan. We haven't seen the agreement, so we don't really know what they're celebrating, but according to press reports, the agreement is symbolic rather than substantive.
According to icasualties.org, which tallies statistics from the Department of Defense, 381 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan since Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago on May 2, 2011.
No U.S. official has explained to us yet what we won in Afghanistan since May 2, 2011, that justified the additional sacrifice that we have made in Afghanistan since Osama bin Laden's death. No U.S. official has presented a case that we are safer than we were a year ago as a result of our additional sacrifice in Afghanistan, still less that our increased safety was sufficient to justify the additional sacrifice of the last year.
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No U.S. official has explained how much the threat al Qaeda poses to the United States diminishes each time we kill someone in the top 30. For example, if we kill #30, presumably he is replaced by #31. Was #30 so much more effective, or are they likely to be about the same? If they're about the same, then it's hard to be very impressed by the killing of #30. If some foreign adversary managed to kill the 30th most important leader in the United States -- assuming that they could figure out a way to agree on who the 30th most important leader in the U.S. was -- how impressed would we be? By how much would our operations be disrupted? Former President Bush said getting bin Laden wasn't that important. If the importance of getting bin Laden is a matter of dispute, how confident can we be in the importance of al Qaeda #30?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-afghanistan-_b_1470191.html
As one of the few "crazies" who thinks bin Laden may not have been important to Bush because he died in December 2001 (as reported in the Egyptian Paper al-Wafd, Vol 15 No. 4633), and since the President officially killed him a year ago, it doesn't make sense to stay one more day. Couldn't the US just declare "victory" and end all combat now instead of two years from now, or 12 years from now? (will I be reported to the Administration's conspiracy police for my thoughts?)
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