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[atomicwinter]

Why is this thread still alive?

Hes dead, nothing is going to change, he hasn't been pulling the strings for years. Other leadership is already cemented. It is nothing more than a symbolic victory if anything. No one is coming home, Islamic radicals aren't going to stop.. the war will continue.

[nenjin]

Because this is a forum? FFS, for every 3 posts on topic, there's at least one person who has to sit at the edges of the conversation making wrist-cutting pessimistic statements and yelling at everyone like they're the sole voice of reason on the internet. Get over it.

[Aqizzar]

I'm pretty sure that it'd be completely within all the agreements for us to drop a Reaper or Predator in instead. Of course, to kill that SOB, certainty is important. Insertion was the way to go.

If everything is to be believed, and there's no reason to doubt this since it's both rational and pretty obvious to the decision-making, the President was presented with the "blow the crap out of it, and blow up the rubble" option first, so it certainly wasn't out of consideration.  He chose to go for the Call of Duty raid, for three reasons.  One was to be sure that it was actually the man himself, avoiding the sticky situation of having to explain why America leveled a house across town from Pakistan's West Point, with the likely problem of not having enough of a body left behind to prove it, with the Pakistani government entirely in control of the cleanup.  And there's also the matter of recovering all that information from the compound, which would have been lost in a bombing, and has certainly lent some credibility to the whole affair, since bin Laden himself was obviously not in retirement from the terrorism-planning game, even if he wasn't a critical element anymore.

The other important one is that there was something like two dozen people in the compound, most of them women and children (since it was a house for three families after all), and the whole "killing sixty civilians for one target" catch has been the prime criticism of the drone-strike method.  Killing a bunch of children along with bin Laden would have taken some of the wind out of the sails.

[nenjin]

It would be a very Bin Laden move to surround himself with non-combatants, in the event that he did die, it was still a black eye for whoever pulled the trigger. They really made the right call I believe, it had the highest probable chance of success, lowest loss of civilian life and yielded the most concrete proof that he was killed.

[mainiac]

It would?  I don't recall him using that tactic in the past.

[nenjin]

Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters tend to hole up near non-combatant populations, even fighting from their houses. It hamstrings the US military from using their best weaponry on the offensive. When the Taliban and Al Qaeda attack a US outpost, we respond by laying ordinance on open countryside. When the US goes on the offensive against strongholds and personnel, they're often both situated in villages, preventing the US from calling in gunships and air support. It also allows them to hide or retreat into the village population if they need to.

When your enemy has superior airpower, you hide places where they can't or won't use it against you. Not all Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters hide in mountain caves. Their leadership does, but the actual fighters need to be on the ground, close to where the Americans are.

Frankly, the whole cave bit is overstated, I think. A drop cloth behind you, and you could be anywhere. Including a nice suburb in Pakistan.

[mainiac]

Al Qaeda members might but I don't recall Bin Laden himself ever using that tactic.  His tactic is generally to send others to fight.

[Aqizzar]

Al Qaeda members might but I don't recall Bin Laden himself ever using that tactic.  His tactic is generally to send others to fight.

Well, there's really no "record" of what bin Laden's usual self-defense strategy is, besides using couriers to keep anyone from finding him.  About the first and last time anyone but Afghan rivals ever had him in a militarily-defensive position was the mountain complex in Tora Bora a decade ago.  "Human shields" wasn't a tactic, because he's almost never needed a tactic.

[nenjin]

Put another way, when you're the #1 most wanted person in the world, surrounding yourself with wives and children sounds like a deliberate choice that has little to do with anyone's security.

[Bohandas]

Why is this thread still alive?

Hes dead, nothing is going to change, he hasn't been pulling the strings for years. Other leadership is already cemented. It is nothing more than a symbolic victory if anything. No one is coming home, Islamic radicals aren't going to stop until we've cut them down to the last man

Fixed.

[Servant Corps]

Because this is a forum? FFS, for every 3 posts on topic, there's at least one person who has to sit at the edges of the conversation making wrist-cutting pessimistic statements and yelling at everyone like they're the sole voice of reason on the internet. Get over it.

No we aren't "getting over it". An incident happens, we talk about it, we finish talking, we move on with our lives and focus on other issues. We do not keep on resurrecting this topic to bring up new details repeat the exact same talking points and continue this self-congratulatory nonsense. Or are we going to see "Osama bin Laden Dead" still on the first page of this forum on December 21st 2012?

[Bauglir]

It'll die when it dies. It's a fairly major development, in symbolic terms. It really ought to be expected to take a while, especially since most (hardly all) of the discussion is about the related topics of US-Pakistan relations in light of the event, the morality of assassinations, and the motivations behind US foreign policy relating to terrorism (or announced to be related to terrorism). There's a lot of stuff crammed in here, and maybe a few spin-off threads could stand to be started, but since they all revolve around this as an example or as a fundamental starting point for the conversation, it's not unreasonable to carry it on here. Honestly, all complaining about it accomplishes is generating posts exactly like this explaining why it's not the Downfall of the Forums (we certainly don't seem to have resorted to shitposting or flaming yet), dragging the thread further up the page and ensuring it stays active for just a little while longer.

[Gorjo MacGrymm]

You know, if you dont like the thread, dont open it.

edited for content and language

[Toady One]

People should be more calm in here.  It has only been a week.

[Nikov]

Back on the rails maybe?

Without a doubt, the best part about performing the raid was the intelligence we're gathering off captured materials. It is also pretty standard proceedure for leaders who want to be impossible to locate to use a tiny handful of die-hard couriers. OBL's mistake was using the same couriers for so long after having multiple people who were in contact with those couriers captured. We never would have found him if the couriers were retired and OBL changed safehouses.

Also I'm glad we're not emulating Achilles in our treatment of the body. I hated the old bastard as much as everyone else, but this "head on a pike" talk sickens me. Needless provocation for no real tangible result is both bad politics and bad warfighting.

Anyone else care to comment on these lines?