Obama stuck to guns on bin Laden

Opinion: May 4, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

He did what he said he would do.

Five times I have interviewed President Obama, and in each conversation I raised the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Going back through the tapes and transcripts, I’m reminded that he was as consistent in his remarks as I was in repeatedly asking. And in the end, it went down just the way he promised.

That bin Laden was hiding in plain view, in the shadow of the military academy of the Pakistani army, in a community noted for the numbers of its military retirees, is testament to Pakistan’s obfuscation of our objectives. Obama was right to therefore disregard its sovereignty.

Intelligence gathering

U.S. intelligence learned of the compound in Abbottabad in August. Two months later, on Oct. 27, I interviewed Obama and asked, “Is it at a point, sir, where it’s time to send our special forces across that Afghan-Pakistan border, engaged in the hunt of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri?”

The president was understandably reluctant to go into details about covert U.S. operations in Pakistan, though he did allude to such activity: “I will say that we are ramping up the pressure each and every day. And I’m actually confident that the work that Gen. (David) Petraeus is doing on the Afghan side of the border, the cooperation we’ve begun to get from the Pakistanis on their side of the border, is starting to have an effect. But as you and I have talked about before, every day I’ve got a team of some of our best people who are still looking for bin Laden, still looking for Zawahiri, still focused on making sure that we are defeating and dismantling al-Qaida once and for all.”

In the midst of the celebrations for how this ended, it is important to remember that there was a time when Sen. Obama was derided for saying he would act in the manner he just pursued. That happened in August 2007, when he said he would move on actionable intelligence regarding high-value terrorist targets if Pakistan did not.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Christopher Dodd, among others, were critical of those remarks. He did not temper his comments.

Obama has been a constant critic of our outsourcing of the hunt for bin Laden. In March 2008, he told me that the Pakistanis “have been playing us like a violin.”

When we spoke a month later, he said: “When it comes to military aid, we shouldn’t be propping up Pakistan’s military when they’re focused on a possible war with India and ignoring the very immediate and real threat of militants who are in their territories. And our aid has to be in some ways contingent on them making a serious effort.”

Covert operations

In our next conversation, on Oct. 9, 2008, Obama again chastised those in Pakistan who were willing to harbor America’s enemies and reiterated his intention to authorize covert operations to target high-value adversaries within that country.

As the war in Iraq wound down, he told me, the United States also would have to “send a strong message to Pakistan that we can’t tolerate safe havens for bin Laden, where he’s training terrorists to kill Americans. We can’t tolerate it. Now we need to work with Pakistan to dismantle those training camps and kill bin Laden. But if Pakistan is unwilling or unable to take bin Laden out and we have him in our sights, we’ve got to do it.”

When I spoke to Obama in the White House in August 2009, he told me that the Pakistani army was “for the first time actually fighting in a very aggressive way, and that’s how we took out Baitullah Mehsud, the top Taliban leader in Pakistan, who was also one of bin Laden’s key allies.”

But when that level of pursuit did not last, Obama acted without consulting the Pakistanis.

In view of what he said so often, it’s difficult to fathom that so many have for so long questioned his resolve in destroying America’s enemies.

Michael Smerconish writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.