Michael Hirsh has an interesting interpretation of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Ever so gingerly, even as they praised President Obama’s success against Osama bin Laden, some former senior Bush administration officials have sought to take a little credit for the mission themselves. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, interviewed by MSNBC this week, even called the operation “a good story for continuity across two presidencies.”
That assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader this week lies a profound discontinuity between administrations—a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists. From his first great public moment when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he thought that George W. Bush had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11. And very quickly upon taking office as president, Obama reoriented the war back to where, in the view of many experts, it always belonged. He discarded the idea of a “global war on terror” that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah. Obama replaced it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.
This reorientation was part of Obama’s reset of America’s relations with the world. Bush, having gradually expanded his definition of the war to include all Islamic “extremists,” had condemned the United States to a kind of permanent war, one that Americans had to fight all but alone because no one else agreed on such a broadly defined enemy. (Hez­bollah and Hamas, for example, arguably had legitimate political aims that al-Qaida did not, which is one reason they distanced themselves from bin Laden.) In Obama’s view, only by focusing narrowly on true transnational terrorism, and winning back all of the natural allies that the United States had lost over the previous decade, could he achieve America’s goal of uniting the world around the goal of extinguishing al-Qaida.

Hirsh continues, making the fair and familiar point that Iraq was a strategic blunder, etc. He also suggests that the Bush administration strategy in Afghanistan led the Pakistanis to hedge their bets:

There is no longer any question that the diversion of U.S. troops and, in particular, intelligence assets and special forces to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 produced a Taliban and Qaida resurgence in South Asia. It also made the Pakistanis—who even in the best of times were playing a double game—hedge about their own strategic shift away from support for jihadis as a counterweight to India. In 2007, Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time, suggested that this was when Washington began to lose some of his country’s support. After 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003—just as Bush was invading Iraq—“al-Qaida was almost destroyed in an operational sense,” Durrani told me. “But then al-Qaida got a vacuum in Afghanistan. And they got a motivational area in Iraq. Al-Qaida rejuvenated.”

Let’s go in reverse.

Might the Pakistanis have not hedged their bets in the absence of an Iraq invasion? The Pakistanis had hoped that the United States would use its leverage to force a settlement of the Kashmir issue favorable to Pakistani interests. In that case, the Taliban-dominated Afganistan would no longer have been seen as a useful source of “strategic depth.” But is there a conceivable universe in which India would have agreed to such a settlement?

Did Al Qaeda experience a marked revival in Afghanistan after 2007? Or are the various insurgencies that fight under the banner of the Taliban meaningfully distinguishable from Al Qaeda? And if the Taliban aren’t Al Qaeda, is it fair to say that the Taliban stepped up its attacks but that Al Qaeda did not fill the vacuum in Afghanistan? I say all of this as someone who now believes that the war in Iraq was not the wisest course of action given the alternatives.

As for the laserlike focus of Al Qaeda, would this laserlike focus have done any good without detailed intelligence built up in progressive fashion? Consider the following from Yochi Dreazen, also of National Journal:

The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration’s counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.
In the fall of 2009, for instance, JSOC and the CIA located one of the administration’s most-wanted men, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the leader of the al-Qaida affiliate in East Africa, as he drove though Somalia. Nabhan was suspected of orchestrating a string of deadly attacks in Kenya in 2002 as well as being involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks that left 250 dead. Military commanders told Obama administration officials that commandos could try to take Nabhan alive or kill him from the air. The White House told JSOC they wanted Nabhan dead. A short time later, U.S. helicopters carrying SEAL commandos fired missiles into Nabhan’s car, killing him instantly.
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.

Aha! Killing enemy combatants rather than killing them via drone sounds very masculine. So why on earth would the Bush administration have captured thousands of suspected militants, particularly in light of the controversies surrounding detention camps?

Here is a speculative thought: by capturing enemy combatants, a step that requires endangering the lives of U.S. military personnel, we could theoretically gather intelligence regarding the larger human infrastructure of terrorist organizations. This in turn could lead us to identify other targets. I can’t think of another good reason to capture enemy combatants at such high cost. (“Just for laughs” doesn’t sound right to me.)

And what accounts for the soaring number of drone attacks? One hypothesis is that the Obama administration is using them against the rank-and-file as well as high-value targets. Now, it could be that the rank-and-file have no valuable information to offer regarding the evolving structure of the armed organizations in question. Or it could be that the United States government has determined that it is incapable of extracting information from hardened terrorists, perhaps because we’ve decided to abjure the use of coercive methods. (I can’t speak to whether or not this is true.)

So strategic reorientations aside, it does seem as though a heavy reliance on drone attacks might represent the intelligence of equivalent of eating seed corn.

Granted, this could be the right thing to do now that Al Qaeda’s capabilities have been so degraded. But that was the product of a steady strategy of gathering intelligence that didn’t begin in January of 2009.