Patterico has been connecting some dots in the horrific news out of Afghanistan today.
- Back in May, right up until the beginning of the raid, the Obama administration and the Pentagon were in agreement: there would be no release of details of the raid. The reasons were many: to protect methods and sources we used in finding him, to prevent giving the enemy any useful intelligence, and to protect the operators from retaliation.
- That agreement lasted less than a day: President Obama identified them as SEAL Team Six, and Vice President Biden identified their commander by name. Further, we were immediately treated to a near blow-by-blow of the raid (the details of which kept evolving, as the Obama administration kept trying to find the version of the truth that would make them look best), as well as a full rundown of just how we found him.
- Three months later, in our single worst day in the entire 10-year war in Afghanistan, a helicopter is shot down, killing 25 members of SEAL Team 6, the air crew, and seven Afghan allies.
Of course, this all could be coincidence. The Taliban, after ten years of fighting, actually scored their single greatest victory. Of all the helicopters they’ve seen and targeted, they just happened to pick the one filled with members of the unit that killed Bin Laden, just barely three months after he became fish food.
This could be just coincidence. Or it could be a combination of good intelligence, good planning, a healthy dose of luck, and the benefit of the goddamned assholes in the Obama administration who couldn’t keep their fucking mouths shut and put his re-election over basic operational security.
I’ve often said that while the mission planning and execution of the Bin Laden raid were almost textbook perfect (the loss of one helicopter notwithstanding), the followthrough by the Obama administration was just as textbook an example of letting political considerations trump all else.
What I would have counseled (based on my extensive study of various and sundry technothrillers and non-fiction books) would have to removed all bodies from the raid, evacuate all survivors out of the compound, then level the entire compound.
And then said absolutely nothing for several days.
Let the rest of Al Qaeda try to figure out how their leader’s top-secret hideout became a pile of rubble. Let them interrogate the survivors and find out what they saw. Let them pick through the rubble and try to inventory who and what was missing. (The Obama administration also bragged about seizing computers, flash drives, and all kinds of media during the raid.) Let them try to decide who was killed, who was captured, and who was spilling their guts.
And all the time, we watch very carefully to see who is talking to who — and about what.Who is the first to say that it was Bin Laden’s compound? Who will he be calling? And who will they be calling?
Instead, Obama and his cronies had to make damned certain that the whole world knew 1) Bin Laden was dead, and B) Obama was the one who gave the order. And just to prove it, they had to give out all kinds of verifying details.
And in the process, they painted great big targets on some of the best America has.
Well, today, over two dozen of those best died, killed at the hands of those most angry over the death of Bin Laden. Purely by coincidence, I’m certain. They just got really, really, really lucky.
