group inside Pakistan, and they had directly or indirectly prevented further terrorist attacks inside the United States So they were very confident. Those who had been at work longer, like him, had known failure. They knew the fragility of even the soundest-seeming analysis. The WMD story had been a bracing lesson. He bore responsibility for it.
“Mr. President, if we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent.” He said he had spent a lot of time on both questions—WMDs and Abbottabad. He had seen no fewer than thirteen analytical drafts on the former question, and at least as many on the latter.
“And I’m telling you, the case for WMDs wasn’t just stronger, it was
This kicked off more discussion about percentage levels of confidence. The president listened, but he had already pretty much made up his mind.
“One of the things you learn as president is you’re always dealing with probabilities,” he told me. “No issue comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. No issue comes to my desk where there’s one hundred percent confidence that this is the right thing to do. Because if people were absolutely certain then it would have been decided by somebody else. And that’s true in dealing with the economic crisis. That’s true in an order to take a shot at a pirate. That’s true about most of the decisions I make during the course of the day. So I’m accustomed to people offering me probabilities. In this situation, what you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.”
Obama had no trouble admitting it to himself. If he acted on this, he was going to be taking a gamble, pure and simple. A big gamble.
If they were successful, and if the Pacer was bin Laden, then killing or capturing him would mark a clear and central victory in the war al Qaeda had started almost ten years ago. It would deliver on the promise Obama had made campaigning four years earlier, the one where he said he would take a shot unilaterally in Pakistan if he got a good chance, the promise that nearly everyone had criticized, including some, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who were now in the room helping him to decide. That promise in some ways had
If he tried and failed, however—and they had not yet begun to calculate all the spectacular ways it might fail—then some brave American warriors might lose their lives attempting something that might turn out to be a major national embarrassment. Failure would likely be as prestige-enhancing for al Qaeda as Desert One had been for Iran’s mullahs in 1980. Bin Laden’s stature, which had waned considerably since 2001, would get a new boost, the kind that translated into more money, more recruits, and more attacks. Success might bump up Obama’s political standing at home for a few weeks, but failure could brand him as an ineffectual commander in chief, and doom his chances for a second term as surely as Desert One had doomed Carter’s.
Either way, success or failure, there would be an outraged Pakistan to deal with. American relations with that difficult, nuclear-armed nation were already strained nearly to breaking. Whatever he decided, Obama later told me, was going to be a judgment call based on circumstantial evidence, piecing together patterns. There was still a possibility that this was some warlord from Afghanistan who had set up shop, or that this was a drug dealer from the Gulf who valued his privacy or had a mistress or a second family. There were other stories that might have explained the pattern. The calculation the president had to make was whether it was probable enough that bin Laden was there to justify the risks, given the importance to America’s national security.
So as the conversation around him about levels of certainty wore on, the president, who usually did more listening than speaking in these meetings, interrupted.
“This is fifty-fifty,” he said. That silenced everyone. “Look guys, this is a flip of the coin. I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that.”
So, if he decided to act, what were his options? Obama was presented with two. The simplest, and the one that posed the least risk to American forces, was to reduce the compound to dust, along with everyone and everything in and around it. To do the job right, the air force had calculated that would mean raining as many as thirty or more precision bombs from a high-flying B-2, or launching a comparable number of missiles. This would be enough to guarantee that anything breathing on, in, or near that plot of earth would be killed. It would vaporize everything above ground and pulverize anything below. There would be minimal worry about encountering Pakistani air defenses—a lone high-flying B-2 Stealth bomber would be long gone before the country knew it had been hit. With no ground forces there was no chance of mixing it up with that nation’s army or police. It would be a mighty, sudden stroke from a dark sky that would leave nothing but a big smoking hole in the middle of Abbottabad—which, wasn’t going to sell very well. Collateral damage would make the Pakistani fury all the more righteous. But it would get the job done.
Obama asked how many people were living at the compound and was informed that there were four adult males, five women, and nearly twenty children. He asked about the houses that were close to the compound in the neighborhood. Those, too, would be completely destroyed, along with every resident man, woman, and child. This really gave the president pause. America was not going to obliterate them on a fifty-fifty chance of also killing Osama bin Laden.
So the president scrapped that plan immediately. He said the only way he would even consider attacking the compound from the air was if the volume and precision of munitions was such that the blast area would be drastically reduced.
Then McRaven explained the ground option for the first time. His team had not yet fleshed out the mission completely. The one thing he could tell the president for sure was that if his team could be delivered to the compound, they could clear it and kill or capture bin Laden with minimal loss of life. The admiral delivered this opinion with the kind of confidence that can come only with long experience. He wasn’t trying to sell it. He had been in these meetings back in the early years after 9/11, and he had seen how various factions or branches or agencies had worked to sell their approach to the president. This was not like that. He was surprised, given the importance of this mission and the risks it entailed, that the discussions were not more rancorous. Panetta and Brennan had set the tone from the beginning. In every meeting he had attended, options were laid on the table and discussed, pro and con. McRaven had told his aide on the project: “We may end up doing this thing, we may not. In the end we’re going to do what’s best for the country. If it’s dropping one bomb on the compound, then that’s what we’re going to do.” So he presented the still-sketchy ground operation as a simple statement of fact. Without bringing any more people into the planning loop, he said, “I can tell you that we can succeed on the raid. What I can’t tell you yet is how I get in and how I get out. To do that requires detailed planning by air planners who do this for a living and assess the air defense capabilities of that country and who can plot and route how we would get in and how we would get out and what obstacles we would face getting in and getting out.
“So I am not recommending a raid,” he told the president. “I am telling you that if I could get in, we could execute a raid. Getting out might be a little sporty. I can’t recommend a raid until I do the homework.”
Even if he had done the homework, the admiral felt no need to push for the raid. He believed everyone in the room would come to that conclusion on his or her own. The facts would steer them to it. He also believed the president would not let this opportunity slip. The bombing option was too loud and messy, too many innocents would be killed, and in the end you would not have any way to prove you had killed bin Laden. After a strike like that, with the big smoking hole in Abbottabad, Pakistan would be understandably furious. There would be no chance that an American team would get the chance to sift patiently through the rubble looking for DNA. Actually getting bin Laden was the only thing that would make the blowback from Pakistan worth it. But you would have to be able to show that’s what you had done. Nothing would accomplish that short of having his corpse or living person in custody. Only that would eliminate any mystery about why you had done it. The risks were greater whenever you sent men in on the ground, but his men were more than capable, and he knew Obama knew it. He had also learned that this president was not unduly risk averse. He had been favorably impressed over the previous two years. Obama had made the final call on almost every major mission JSOC had undertaken in that time, and he was not timid. He would always listen without tipping his thoughts to discussions of the military and political risks, then he would retreat for a time, a few hours or until the next morning, and would generally come back to say, “I gotta go
