WASHINGTON — As President Barack Obama delivered witty jokes about the “birther” issue and other divisive political rhetoric at the 2011 White House correspondent’s dinner, he kept to himself a secret that was heavily weighing on him.
America would find out the very next night that the secret was he made the difficult call to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. He announced that the CIA gathered enough intelligence to send in elite Navy SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan, which completed the mission by killing the most wanted man in the world.
About three months later, American forces, including members of the same elite Navy SEALs unit that raided Bin Laden’s compound, were shot down and killed in Afghanistan by a rocket-propelled grenade from a Taliban insurgent. As the single deadliest attack on American forces since the war on terrorism began, this is a reminder for a president, who campaigned against the war, about the deadly consequences of military action.
“He [President Obama] has adopted a moderate posture on Afghanistan since 2008,” said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information.
It’s clear that the war has made a paradigm shift to being Obama’s war. Pressure seems to be mounting on him to make a decision on what to do now that he’s been in office for over three years.
The Washington Post reported on his trip to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to mourn the lives of the 30 soldiers killed in Afghanistan:
“Since his last trip to Dover, 874 more Americans have died in Afghanistan, and Obama has signed 874 handwritten condolence letters. The war is fully his now. This time, he went to Dover to greet the charred and dismembered remains of Americans he had ordered to Afghanistan himself.”
In late June, Obama announced he will order the withdrawal of 33,000 troops from the war by the end of 2012. But, will the recent attack put a damper on his plans?
Wheeler believes that the Obama administration’s stance on the war remains the same, but the unnecessary “media attention” of the insurgency has brought the war back to the forefront of issues.
“This kind of thing happens in war all the time. It means nothing other than it’s brought the war to people’s mind, it hasn’t changed the debate at all,” he said.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, believes that the country’s response to the incident can be viewed two ways. He says it shows that the country is fed up with what is going on, but at the same time it shows that people here are resilient and patient dealing with a decade long war that has caused the death of thousands of American troops.
“Some people will say can’t we just leave and then others will say look at what these people did, we can’t let them get away with this,” he said.
Therefore, he doesn’t think any added pressure because of this recent tragedy will change the current administration’s approach on the war and that Obama has made his plans clear.
“The President has already reflected the nation’s mood by announcing the taking out of troops next year,” he added.
“There are a lot of forces and arguments that lead us to say we don’t want to be there forever.”
