Goal Was Never to Capture Bin Laden

A good article discussing how the Obama Administration never wanted to capture Bin Laden. They wanted him dead. Good for them. Bin Laden had 9-10 years to surrender. The Taliban had their chance to turn him in. I suspect the Pakistani's could have turned him in if they wanted as well. They chose not to. And Bin Laden chose to fight on. He declared war on us. Al Queda can surrender or sue for peace if they want. Until then, they have targets on their chests.

Sure, this presents a slippery slope argument. Here is an interesting factoid:

The White House has also sharply escalated its use of armed drones inside Pakistan, where the robotic planes are launching record numbers of missile strikes on suspected militants in the country's lawless tribal areas. The number of drone attacks has soared from 35 in 2008, the year before Obama's inauguration, to 117 last year. Bill Roggio of Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks the attacks, estimates that missiles fired by American drones have killed nearly 1,500 people inside Pakistan, mostly in the two years that Obama has overseen the undeclared war there. Few, if any, senior militants have been arrested by CIA operatives or U.S. commandos over that same time period.

Now, let's just point out the difference in strategies here between the Bush Admin and Obama Admin. Bush Admin captured a lot of Al Queda and Taliban fighters on the battlefield and then put them in prisons and interrogated them for information. They tortured some of them...I'm not sure how many...but from what I can recollect, it was under 100. In contrast (and granted the war has changed over the years), the Obama Admin has began using drones for effectively to target and kill Al Queda and Taliban people. And now, with the Bin Laden kill, we see we are also using Special Forces Assassination Squads. A large part of this change of strategy has to do with Pakistan's double game and with the development of the drone technology. Nevertheless, from a moral standpoint, is it obviously worse to be holding prisoners indefinitely and torturing the worst of the worst for more information about attacks or summarily executing guys who are likely Al Queda members from drones and with Special Forces teams and likely killing innocents in collateral damage?