Is It "Justice"?

The danger of confusing the death of Osama Bin Laden with an act of justice.

Thomas Nachbar, 05/05/11

When President Obama announced the death of Osama Bin Laden, he repeatedly invoked the concept of justice. As the president himself put it most succinctly, "Justice has been done It is impossible to argue that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was not "justifiable," or even "just," and I might even be inclined to accept it as a form of "justice." But to use that term to describe what happened last weekend in Abbottabad, Pakistan, is to invite confusion we cannot as a nation afford.

To describe an act as "justice" is not merely to claim that the act was legitimate; it is to claim that it is legitimate in a particular way. For instance, we say that our legal system dispenses "justice," because when someone is punished, it is done according to a set of prescribed rules and procedures that have their origin in the sovereign will of the people. We actually have a different word for describing when private parties act on their own initiative to punish criminals: vigilantism.

At its core, then, what U.S. forces visited upon Osama Bin Laden was violence. That is frequently what the U.S. armed forces are asked to do, and they do it very, very well. Violence can be a form of justice, and justice occasionally requires acts of violence. But, despite their occasionally close relationship, justice and violence should never be confused, even when violence is undertaken in service of the most just of causes. Osama Bin Laden was himself an accomplished engineer of violence, but no right-thinking person would think he was a source of justice.

Why bother making the distinction? Because we can act according to our principles only if we can think clearly about them, and we can think clearly about them only if we talk clearly about them. And our principles -- those worth fighting and dying for -- are what separate us from the likes of Osama Bin Laden, not the ability to kill people thousands of miles away.

While it's true that those principles provide us with a huge strategic advantage in the war against extremism, the primary benefit of having principles is one we enjoy ourselves: Adherence to our principles is the way in which our nation -- and in particular our national security apparatus -- preserves its rationality and humanity while prosecuting an uncertain war against an unseen enemy. Our principles are our way of making sense of the impossibly difficult questions that arise when we join the fight against ideological extremists whose only objective is to kill as many Americans as possible.

Making sense of the messy world through the lens of our principles is no easy task, though. Enemies do not present themselves in clearly defined categories ready for logical, pre-determined responses. We have to take circumstances and opponents as they come. The stakes are high and the pressure is on. Like a high-school math student nearing the end of an exam, there is considerable temptation to skip to the answer without showing one's work.

But skipping to the answer -- even if it's as appealing as a terrorist killed or captured -- is always a mistake, because it's the work, and not the answer, that separates the president of the United States from the head of a particularly large and well-organized mob. Skipping to the answer -- failing to acknowledge the distinctions that separate justice from violence -- is the kind of mistake that led to the confused and occasionally disastrous detention and interrogation policies that marked the beginning of America's active participation in this conflict back in the early 2000s. The impulse to justify skipping the work must be guarded against with constant vigilance, precisely because sometimes just getting to the answer is so rewarding. Even today, years after our nation outlawed "enhanced interrogation techniques" (whose claims to legality even before the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 were tenuous at best), there are those who defend them on the ground that they may have helped lead to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

I'm not proposing unthinking adherence to high-minded principles in the face of practical problems. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that how successful we are in practicing our principles depends in large part on how carefully we preserve the distinctions those principles demand. That is truer in today's world than it has ever been before.

We were successful in tracking down and killing Osama Bin Laden because the United States has a sophisticated and powerful -- and consequently very large -- national security establishment. The practical difficulty of managing such a large organization is demonstrated by the continuous shift between consolidation and fragmentation that has marked the history of the U.S. defense establishment, as administration after administration has struggled with the right form for an organization that has to meet an ever-changing set of threats. Oversight is a good and valuable thing, but complete oversight of such a large and dispersed organization is, as history demonstrates, impractical. The only practical way to assure that those who serve our nation serve its principles is to combine oversight with a strong individual understanding of both the principles they serve and their own limited role in serving them. Sometimes different agencies work together, but sometimes their job is to balance each other, and much of that balance comes from their distinct institutional cultures, cultures that are dependent on principles as much as practice.

What SEALs and the other members of our nation's armed forces do is different from what law enforcement officers do, although both occasionally involve violence. (As a society, we tend to accentuate the role that violence plays in both professions -- police are, after all, "peace officers," and today's wars are being fought through building as much as they are by targeting insurgents and terrorists.) Both members of the armed forces and law enforcement officers operate according to well-defined principles, but they are not identical principles, and those differences need to be preserved in both rhetoric and practice. The principles under which CIA operatives operate, given their status as neither members of the armed forces nor law enforcement officers, are considerably murkier. Lumping what all three groups do together under the rubric of "justice" might be rhetorically appealing, but it invites the same kind of mistakes that were made in places like Abu Ghraib, where the blurring of such lines helped erode adherence to our principles, with catastrophic results.

The problem, at some level, rests with a concept even more nebulous than justice: "security." Those who work in the defense and intelligence communities are frequently asked to serve security, not justice. But "security" is not a principle, vitally important though it may be. Indeed, security is frequently in tension with our principles, as Benjamin Franklin aptly pointed out. The pursuit of security, unlike the pursuit of justice, is neither self-justifying nor self-limiting. We need something else to give meaning to the quest for security -- to determine whether a particular security measure is in keeping with our principles. Confusing security and justice invites those whose job it is to protect our security to think they are acting in the name of justice. Serving justice is pretty heady stuff and naturally invites overreaching in furtherance of so noble a cause. We have consequently imposed very careful limits on those we entrust to serve justice (the rules and procedures mentioned above) that we could not plausibly impose on those who protect our national security.

Already, lawyers (among them Geoffrey Robertson, Julian Assange's defense attorney) are opining that, in order for the killing of Bin Laden to have been legal, the SEALs on the raid must have acted in self-defense and that the Navy should accordingly conduct an investigation into whether his killing was justified. But that is treating SEALs on a combat mission as though they were law enforcement officers conducting an arrest. By virtually any account of the law of war, Osama Bin Laden was a valid military target, and as far as we can tell from the news accounts, this was a military mission undertaken by a military unit. To require that military units can use lethal force only in self-defense is not only a complete misunderstanding of the law of war (under whose auspices the SEALs were operating); it would subject our servicemembers to intolerable risk and cripple our nation's ability to defend itself. Understanding the distinction between security and justice is not just a limit to protect against overreaching by security agencies; it's also a protection for our armed forces as they carry out their lawful mission to defend our national security.

The death of Osama Bin Laden undoubtedly makes the world a safer place, and I am hopeful that his death will bring at least a small degree of closure to both the families of his thousands of victims and to the nation as a whole. There is little to like about acts of violence, but as they go, it is hard to make a better case for the just use of it than in the killing of Osama Bin Laden. But neither violence nor the security it frequently serves should be confused with foundational principles like justice. Although Osama Bin Laden himself was defeated by violence, it is only principles like justice that can eventually defeat the ideology he represented.

http://www.slate.com/id/2293116/

The Debacle That Didn't Happen

So many things could have gone wrong in the raid on Bin Laden's compound.

Daniel Byman and Phillip Padilla, 05/04/11

Things went sour from the start. As the helicopters launched from the U.S. base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and crossed the border into Pakistan, one helicopter and the Navy SEAL team members it carried had to abort their mission and return to base after mechanical difficulties. The remaining helicopters had to carry on by themselves. As they neared the target in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistani air defenses spotted the chopper and began firing. The strike team avoided the fire and kept going but encountered stiff resistance when it landed, because the building's inhabitants had been tipped off.

The helicopters' propellers blew an intense heat onto the SEALs as they landed near the compound and sprinted to their assigned breach points. Like a finely tuned orchestra, the SEALs set and simultaneously detonated several breach charges around the compound's courtyard and flooded inside. The tipped-off inhabitants stood ready, wounding several of the SEALs with a withering fire as they poured in. But the SEALs' specially designed weapons and their reflexive sharp-shooting skills developed from hundreds of missions proved too much for the waiting guards. The SEALs eliminated the threats in the courtyard and prepared to enter the target building.

Like clockwork, the SEALs "stacked" at the main house's doors prepared to enter the building to find their ultimate target. But they had miscalculated the strength of the building's reinforced doors, costing them precious time, presenting the enemy hiding inside with an opportunity. Grenades flew through the house's windows, peppering much of the strike team with shrapnel.

After seconds that seemed like hours, the door-breachers broke through. The lead team members burst into the building but quickly realized that the house had been rigged with explosives. Tell-tale signs of a house-borne IED were everywhere: copper wires hugged the walls, leading to several plastic jugs filled with explosives. Before the strike team could pull out, the home exploded, burying several people under its rubble.

In a situation where seconds were critical, it would take hours to dig the operators out of the rubble. Worse yet, their intended target was not among the debris. The gunmen were not the most senior leaders of al-Qaida, but, rather, members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an anti-Indian terrorist group that works closely with the Pakistani government (though some of its members have links to al-Qaida). Even worse, the botched raid had inadvertently led to the deaths of several children living in the compound. As the SEALs salvaged what they could, Pakistani forces from nearby military bases responded quickly, arriving on the scene and demanding their surrender, leading to a standoff covered live on satellite television.

The debacle was a disaster for the president. The nightmares of special operations past all resurfaced: the failed hostage-rescue attempt in Iran in 1980 and the capture of Somali militants in Mogadishu in 1993 that led to the Blackhawk Down fiasco—operations in which eight and 18 American soldiers died, respectively—both resurfaced to haunt the intelligence and special-operations community. Republicans derided the president for his ineffective and weak leadership, while members of his own party privately expressed their doubts about the strategic prowess of their professor-turned-commander-in-chief. In its subsequent propaganda, al-Qaida derided the United States for its "deliberate killing of Muslim children" and boasted of its skilled preparations to foil the U.S. military (even though it let another group fight on its behalf).

But none of that came to pass. Instead of criticizing the president, we are celebrating the death of Public Enemy No. 1. While the administration takes its victory lap and basks in the glow of success, it is worth thinking through the many things that could have gone wrong and how we think about high-risk military operations when they fail.

Let's begin with the intelligence. Information on terrorists is often wrong, fragmentary, or incomplete. Before 9/11, the United States repeatedly tried to find Osama Bin Laden and launch strikes to kill him, but it never had confidence in the intelligence it gathered. At times, terrorists are where the intelligence places them, but civilians are there, too. When Israel killed Hamas mastermind Salah Shehadeh in 2002, it also killed nine children, because Israeli intelligence did not know they were within the radius of the bomb blast. One cannot use intelligence beforehand to predict whether a mission will be a dazzling success or one that results in congressional investigations due to failure.

Too many times to count, U.S. special operations forces have acted on pinpoint intelligence, hoping to kill or capture high-level terrorists, only to find empty buildings, the wrong guy, or traps set for the team. Prior to Sunday's raid, there was no guarantee that the compound's defenders had not prepared al-Qaida's favorite defensive tactics of mutual suicide: house-borne IEDs or suicide vests.

Even when the intelligence is good, it is often exceptionally difficult to act upon. Many top terrorists know to hide in countries in which U.S. special operations are not allowed to operate. U.S. forces had to cross undetected deep into Pakistan. The secrecy of the operation suggests that U.S. officials believed that any request for help from Pakistan would backfire, with Pakistani officials tipping off Bin Laden. But Pakistan's military is competent and often fearful of an Indian military strike. It might have shot down an unknown intruder or at least discovered it and forced the disruption of the mission.

Technology, of course, is fallible. One helicopter did malfunction when the SEAL team tried to leave the compound; as a result they had to blow it up before departing. If the helicopter had gone down anywhere but in the compound, the team would have risked being left exposed for the world to see. Flying at night provided a protective cloak, but the SEALs were working against the clock in order to avoid the eventual response of Pakistani security forces. And no amount of technology is able to answer critical questions before such raids, like "Will the inhabitants of the compound fight back?" or "How many people are inside the house, and how well-armed are they?"

Relations with Pakistan, already at a low point over government contractor Raymond Davis' killing of two Pakistanis he said tried to rob him, could have plunged even further. If Pakistani soldiers or noncombatants had died in the raid, the Pakistani government would have faced tremendous domestic pressure to further distance itself from Washington. American drone strikes that accidentally kill noncombatants in remote parts of the country are headache enough for the government: Lethal mistakes next to the heart of Pakistan could have been far worse politically. American supply routes throughout Pakistan that support ongoing efforts in Afghanistan remain critical Pakistani bargaining chips.

An airstrike would have avoided much of this messiness, but it offered fewer advantages. A drone strike would launch a small bomb, which might not kill Bin Laden. Bombs from a larger, manned aircraft could cause so much damage it would destroy nearby buildings and kill children or other noncombatants in the compound. Before the raid, U.S. officials estimated it would take more than 30 2,000-pound bombs to destroy the complex. Proving that Bin Laden was dead would be harder if the United States did not have the body in its possession. Also, Bin Laden's headquarters presumably was also an intelligence goldmine, and a raid could capture documents, hard drives, and people, while an airstrike buries them in the rubble.

The president, of course, did not have the luxury of knowing he would be right when he made the decision to go with the riskier option: the raid. Fortunately, the decision paid off in spades. The mission's success shows the incredible confidence and skills that U.S. counterterrorism professionals must have in order to mitigate the risks associated with dangerous operations. But these factors can only offset so much risk. In any given operation, mistakes and plain bad luck can undo the sturdiest combination of special operator skills and planning. As we praise the intelligence and special-operations communities today, we should recognize that considerable skill and planning often go into failed raids and that fortune does not only favor the bold. So if we want raids like those that killed Osama Bin Laden, we must countenance those that miss their targets and at times end in disaster—and be supportive of the operators who carry them out and the politicians who order them into action. President Barack Obama should be commended not only for the mission's success (where the real credit spans administrations and special operations and intelligence officers that triumphed over each of the mission's potential setbacks), but for deciding to go forward even when so many things could go wrong. Who dares, wins—but only if the dare pays off.

http://www.slate.com/id/2293022/

Don't Get Cocky, America

Al Qaeda is still deadly without Osama bin Laden.

DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS, 05/02/11

Osama bin Laden's death is a significant blow for al Qaeda, removing a figurehead who had evaded the largest manhunt in world history for almost a decade, and who seemingly managed to remain operationally relevant up until he was killed. In the torrents of commentary that will follow his announced death, many will agree with the puzzling proclamation that analyst Peter Bergen made on CNN last night that this marks the end of the war on terror.

In fact, bin Laden's death does not close this chapter in history. Two points are worth bearing in mind. First, bin Laden's strategic ideas for beating a superpower (which U.S. planners never fully understood) have permeated his organization, and are widely shared by al Qaeda's affiliates. Second, one critical lesson of 2001 is that we should not allow bin Laden's death to cause us to lose sight of the continued threat that al Qaeda poses.

Bin Laden's paradigms for fighting against a superpower foe were forged during the Afghan-Soviet war. Multiple factors prompted the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, including an Islamist insurgency that threatened the country's pro-Soviet regime and infighting among Afghanistan's communists that culminated in bloody internecine clashes. Although the Soviet general staff opposed the invasion, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev insisted that operations in Afghanistan would end successfully in three to four weeks. But the war didn't turn out as he predicted: The Soviets would withdraw after nine years of costly occupation, experiencing stiff resistance from Afghan mujahidin backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

Bin Laden traveled to Pakistan in the early 1980s, soon after the war began. Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former CIA officer, notes in his book The Search for al Qaeda that once he arrived, bin Laden became "a major financier of the mujahidin, providing cash to the relatives of wounded or martyred fighters, building hospitals, and helping the millions of Afghan refugees fleeing to the border region of Pakistan." But it was his first trip to Afghanistan's front lines in 1984 that left a lasting impression on young Osama, and gave him a thirst for more action.

When bin Laden and his fellow Arab comrades-in-arms unexpectedly held their ground in the face of several attacks by Russian special forces (spetsnaz) near Khost, Afghanistan, in the spring of 1987, the skirmish launched bin Laden to prominence in the Arab media as a war hero. In reality, that battle was insignificant to the outcome of the Afghan-Soviet war -- and though bin Laden subsequently emphasized his own role in the conflict, every serious history concludes that the "Afghan Arabs," fighters from the Arab world who traveled to South Asia to join the war against Soviets, were not a military factor in Russia's defeat. Nonetheless, bin Laden's time on the Afghan battlefield was a formative experience for him, one that shaped the approach he would later bring to running al Qaeda.

One lesson bin Laden learned from the war against the Soviets was the importance of his enemy's economy. The Soviet Union didn't just withdraw from Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, but the Soviet empire itself collapsed soon thereafter, in late 1991. Thus, bin Laden thought that he hadn't just bested one of the world's superpowers on the battlefield, but had actually played an important role in its demise. It is indisputable that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan did not directly collapse the Soviet Union; the most persuasive connection that can be drawn between that war and the Soviet empire's dissolution is through the costs imposed by the conflict.

Indeed, bin Laden has spoken of how he used "guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt." He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions -- and these comparisons have been explicitly economic. For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujahidin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, "continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." Similarly, in a September 2007 video message, bin Laden claimed that "thinkers who study events and happenings" were now predicting the American empire's collapse. He gloated, "The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush."

A second aspect of bin Laden's experience in the Afghan-Soviet war that influenced his strategic understanding of his fight against America was the breadth of the anti-Russian resistance. The Soviet invasion outraged the Muslim world, including heads of state, clerics, the Arab media, and the man on the street. In January 1980, Egypt's prime minister called it "a flagrant aggression against an Islamic state." By the end of the month, the foreign ministers of 35 Islamic countries, as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization, passed a resolution through the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) holding the invasion to be a "flagrant violation of all international covenants and norms, as well as a serious threat to peace and security in the region and throughout the world." The Soviet-installed regime in Afghanistan was expelled from the OIC, the delegates of which urged all Muslim countries "to withhold recognition of the illegal regime in Afghanistan and sever diplomatic relations with that country until the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops." On Jan. 30, 1980, the Christian Science Monitor described this condemnation of Soviet actions as "some of the strongest terms ever used by a third-world parley."

The stream of Arabs who flocked to South Asia to help the Afghan cause -- about 10,000 in total, according to Mohammed Hafez, an associate professor in the Naval Postgraduate School's National Security Affairs Department -- was a testament to the widespread outrage caused by the invasion. Hafez has written, "They included humanitarian aid workers, cooks, drivers, accountants, teachers, doctors, engineers and religious preachers. They built camps, dug and treated water wells, and attended to the sick and wounded." There was of course also a contingent of Arab fighters, of which bin Laden became a part. But the volunteers who went to the theater were not the only Arabs to support the Afghan resistance. The Afghan jihad was also aided by a donor network known as the "golden chain," whose financiers came primarily from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states.

Essentially, bin Laden sat at the top of a major multinational organization during the Afghan-Soviet war. Its members included fighters, aid workers, and other volunteers. It enjoyed a significant media presence, external donors, and widespread support. And when al Qaeda later engaged in a global fight against America, bin Laden and his companions similarly understood the media and the struggle for sympathy and allegiance throughout the Muslim world as crucial battlefields. In a 2005 letter to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, bin Laden's deputy Ayman al Zawahiri noted that "more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media." Zawahiri said that when it comes to attaining the caliphate, one of al Qaeda's overarching goals, "the strongest weapon which the mujahidin enjoy, after the help and granting of success by God, is popular support from the Muslim masses."

Had American strategists understood from the outset these twin strategic perceptions, they might have been able to avoid some early costly blunders. But it is not apparent that American planners clearly saw the link between al Qaeda's war and the U.S. economy even after bin Laden boasted of it on the world stage. Moreover, had U.S. officials understood al Qaeda's goal of broadening its fight against the United States, they might have raised more objections to the invasion of Iraq, which created a far broader battlefield for America.

These twin pillars of al Qaeda's strategy have not died with Osama bin Laden. Rather, they permeate the organization and its affiliates. To comprehend this, one need look no further than Inspire, the English-language magazine of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's (AQAP), the group's Yemen affiliate. A special issue of the publication released in November 2010 commemorated a plot that managed to place pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) bombs inside printer cartridges that were flown on FedEx and UPS planes. The issue outlined the great disparity between what the plot cost the terrorists and what it cost their enemies -- a $4,200 price tag for AQAP versus, in the magazine's estimation, a cost of "billions of dollars in new security measures" for America and other Western countries.

In fact, Inspire warned that future attacks would be "smaller, but more frequent," an approach that "some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts." In this strategic vision, the fact that the ink cartridge plot killed nobody did not mean that it had failed: Rather, AQAP's ability to get the disguised explosives aboard planes, and thus significantly drive up the West's security costs, made the plot a success. This illustrates AQAP's embrace of bin Laden's vision of economically undermining America, as he thought he had done to the Soviet Union.

This raises a second critical point: We should neither declare al Qaeda dead nor declare the fight against jihadi militancy over. In 2002, as America was preparing for war with Iraq, many observers wrongly believed that the war in Afghanistan had been won, and al Qaeda significantly degraded.

Former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, speaking at the Air National Guard Senior Leadership Conference in December 2002, described the Afghanistan war as "America's most dramatic victory in the war against terrorism," and claimed that "the Taliban regime and the al Qaeda terrorists have met the fate that they chose for themselves." Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA intelligence analyst who then directed the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, wrote a March/April 2002 article in Foreign Affairs entitled "Next Stop Baghdad?" In it, he wrote, "[T]he key to victory in Afghanistan was a U.S. air campaign that routed the Taliban combat forces." Advancing the theme that the Afghanistan war was won, he warned that "too much delay" in invading Iraq "could be as problematic as too little, because it would risk the momentum gained from the victory over Afghanistan."

As a result of this flawed perception, a significant amount of military and intelligence assets were diverted from Afghanistan to the Iraq theater. Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA's counterintelligence center, has noted that from late 2002 to early 2003, "the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq," including counterterrorism specialists, as well as Middle East and paramilitary operatives.

At the same time, preparation for Iraq caused such units as Delta Force and Navy Seals Team Six, as well as aerial surveillance platforms like the Predator drone, to be shifted into the Iraq theater. The result of this shift in resources was predictable: It weakened American efforts in Afghanistan and allowed an insurgency to thrive. Iraq would continue to cause resources to be diverted from the Afghanistan campaign not just as America and its allies geared up for the new war, but also years later.

In February 2011, I interviewed Andrew Exum, an Arabic-speaking counterinsurgency expert at the Center for a New American Security who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Ranger officer. When I asked him why U.S. efforts in Afghanistan have been so uneven, he replied without hesitation, "One word: Iraq. I remember in 2002 coming back from Afghanistan and being immediately forgotten. We had just fought the largest set-piece battle since the Persian Gulf War, Operation Anaconda, and it was the first time our regiment had been in battle since Vietnam. But the focus was on Iraq." The U.S. had been in Afghanistan for more than nine years at the time we spoke, but because of the focus on Iraq he felt that the military hadn't really been there for nine years. "It's been an economy of force mission, really since 2002," Exum said. "The vast majority of our efforts and our resources -- not just military but also intelligence assets -- have been focused on Iraq."

Bin Laden's death is a blow to al Qaeda. Will America again celebrate prematurely, and provide its enemies an opportunity to regroup? That remains to be seen.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/02/dont_get_cocky_america

How Bin Laden Failed to Wreck the U.S. Economy

Daniel Gross, 05/02/11

In an era when global markets process failure, success, and shocking events with ever-increasing speed, it's not surprising that the death of Osama bin Laden barely registered. Oil fell by almost $2 per barrel this morning, after the news broke, to about $112, and then quickly bounced back to $114. The dollar weakened a bit, and the stock market rose a little. As pundits chewed over the geopolitical meaning of the strike, investors turned their attention back to the large factors that are impacting asset prices. After all, the timely demise of an old thug holed up in Pakistan can't do much to impact the earnings of U.S. industrial companies, the thirst of China's economy for petroleum, or the earnings potential of Facebook.

As we consider what bin Laden wrought, that's somehow fitting. It's common to speak of a post-9/11 world in diplomacy, defense policy, civil liberties and foreign policy — one in which everything changed. In theory, the attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath should have ushered in a new economic era as well. After the attacks, some businesses (airlines, hotels) suffered horribly, while others (security and defense firms) prospered. And some things did change. Iraq and Afghanistan exacted an enormous human and financial cost on the U.S. Funding the wars with debt —and with no offsetting costs or revenue sources — has aggravated the nation's fiscal plight.

But taking the long view, the attacks utterly failed in their effort to create new economic realities for the U.S. and for the global economy. Consider: Bin Laden's primary goal was to strike a fatal blow at the prestige and power of the U.S. and of New York, in particular. In the days after the attack, there were serious questions about the city's future. Who would want to work in an office tower? How could the financial sector and the markets recover? Wouldn't this destroy the centrality of this city — and of cities generally — to America's economy? Those fears dissipated in a matter of months. New York today stands as a living refutation of all these concerns.

Another goal was to disrupt America's ability and desire to connect with the world economically. The natural reaction for a nation that suffers such an attack would be to shut its doors, to turn inward, to subject goods and people coming from abroad to a higher level of scrutiny. A permanently heightened focus on security would throw sand into the gears of the global economy. Here, too, bin Laden failed miserably.

Yes, the U.S. aviation system is still struggling to strike the proper balance between efficiency and security.  And concerns about security put the kibosh on a few transactions, such as when a Dubai-based company wanted to buy the firm that ran Baltimore's port. But otherwise, America's interconnections with the rest of the world have grown by leaps and bounds in the post 9/11-era. Consider the data on international trade. In 2001, exports were about $1 trillion and imports were $1.37 trillion, with total trade coming to $2.4 trillion. By 2010, exports had grown to $1.83 trillion and imports to $2.33 trillion, with the total volume of trade rising 75 percent from 2001 to $4.2 trillion. And while many visitors have had unpleasant experiences with security at U.S. airports, the ability —and desire — of foreigners to visit has barely been impacted. International arrivals to the U.S. have risen from 39.2 million in 2001 to 59.8 million in 2010 , up 53 percent. Foreign direct investment in the U.S. rose from $75 billion in 2002 to $189 billion last year.

One enduring legacy of the post 9/11 world has been more ambiguous — a reliance on extremely low interest rates courtesy of the Federal Reserve. It's often forgotten, but the Greenspan Fed responded to the attacks by flooding the financial system with liquidity. Between August 21, 2001 and December 2, 2001, it cut the Fed Funds rate in half, from 3.5 to 1.75 percent. The rate would ultimately fall to 1 percent in June 2002, and it wasn't until November 2004 that it would rise above 2 percent again. This response was mimicked by the Bernanke Fed in the aftermath of the events of September 15, 2008. Over the past ten years, the Fed Funds rate has been at or below 2 percent for more than half the time.

There's a larger way in which the events of 9/11 still resonate in the way we think about the global economy today. On 9/11, we learned that events and conditions in obscure places in the Middle East can have a significant direct impact on asset prices and on our economic lives.  Given the continuing rise of globalization and trade, that's even more the case today. And just as neglecting the festering pathologies of Afghanistan in the pre-9/11 period proved damaging, we continue to find that neglecting the festering pathologies of other regimes in the Middle East can lead to havoc.

Looking back, we should be enormously proud and gratified that the U.S. economy, and the larger global trading system, was able to absorb the shock of 9/11 and move on. This resilience has proved to be an enormous source of strength. But we shouldn't be triumphant or arrogant about it. The post 9/11 economy is more interconnected, more dependent on oil, and hence more susceptible to shocks than ever before. And we have certainly seen plenty of them in the past many months — from the domestic housing market to Greece, from Tunisia's political upheaval to Japan's earthquake. In the post 9/11 economy, serious disruptions, like bin Laden's attack, can still come from out of the clear blue sky with little warning.

Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance

Email him at grossdaniel11@yahoo.com; follow him on Twitter @grossdm,

The cost of bin Laden: $3 trillion over 15 years

Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley, National Journal

The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.

As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.

What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.

All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America's costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.

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