Killing Osama bin Laden remains the Obama administration’s greatest—if not only—national security and foreign policy success. Obama’s agenda has otherwise met with setback after setback: Russian relations did not “reset” despite our unilateral withdrawal of an ABM system from Eastern Europe; Iran continues its quest for nuclear weapons while it destabilizes the Middle East; China’s rise to great power status remains undeterred; we have rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan; Latin American countries slide back into authoritarianism. In the face of these challenges, Obama’s vast expansion of the federal government at home threatens to impoverish the U.S. military for a generation.

Even the administration’s counter-terrorism success represents more opportunities lost. As the recent memoir by retired CIA officer Jose Rodriguez reminds us, the operation that killed bin Laden was made possible by an intelligence infrastructure that Obama has tried to dismantle. Information from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives identified the sole courier with direct access to bin Laden. Electronic surveillance eventually located him, which allowed the CIA to pinpoint bin Laden’s compound in Abottabad. Without the intelligence obtained years before, the deadly Seal Team 6 would have had nowhere to fly. Bin Laden’s death came as a dividend to all of the Bush administration’s investment in intelligence gathering, primarily the exploitation of information held by al Qaeda leaders.

Bin Laden’s death, in fact, may be the last payment from those investments for some time to come. It is true that Obama kept, and even enhanced, the operations capabilities built by the Bush administration: The special forces teams and drones that can strike with stealth and accuracy, half-way around the world, at a moment’s notice. But even as Obama has kept the gun, he has deprived himself of the ability to aim. He has tried to shut down Guantanamo Bay, move terrorists to trial in downtown New York City rather than special military courts, and ended the enhanced interrogation of al Qaeda leaders. Instead, the administration has relied on drone attacks that kill rather than capture terrorists. The Obama administration has not captured a single high-ranking al Qaeda leader since taking office, surely because it has nowhere to put them (the administration detained the only al Qaeda operative of any note it has captured onboard a Navy ship until delivery to a federal court for trial) and has ended the harsh Bush administration interrogations.

Al Qaeda has suffered a severe blow with the loss of bin Laden. The drone campaign has forced the terrorist group to disperse and decentralize, which deprives it of the ability to leverage its resources and organization as it had before 9-11. The Arab Spring has made al Qaeda’s political message increasingly irrelevant to the Middle East’s future. But these advances may be more rare as the Obama administration continues to live off the investments of the past rather than to make the difficult choices necessary to finish al Qaeda in the future.

Serious Republican candidates should be able to agree that as president, they will reverse the Obama administration’s headlong rush for the exits in Afghanistan and Iraq. The nature of the wound Obama has inflicted on American national security is clear: after helping establish a viable ally in Iraq, we are leaving no significant presence, and just as our forces are reestablishing order and putting the Taliban on the run in Afghanistan, we are leaving before the gains can be solidified. We will be giving our enemies an undeserved gift: Iran will have the opportunity to expand its influence further into Iraq, while the Taliban and al Qaeda will move in where we withdraw in Afghanistan.

But what should the candidates propose as the role for U.S. troops in both countries, other than stubbornness or a knee-jerk opposition to all things Obama? The Republican candidates can chart a course in both countries that avoids expensive and open-ended promises to establish Western-style democracies. Instead, they can focus on two more limited, but equally valuable, missions: protecting Iraq and Afghanistan from foreign security threats and guaranteeing power-sharing deals between rival groups inside both countries. I make the case in a recent scholarly article, “Fixing Failed States,” that smaller independent nations can survive and avoid the fate of failed states when larger states or the international system provides their security and access to trade. I also argue that larger countries like the United States can help stabilize these countries when they prevent a cycle of violence and distrust by enforcing deals between various ethnic and religious groups within a state.

Republican candidates for president could aim for these more modest missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would require fewer troops than we have seen at the height of the surges but would go far in helping both nations maintain stable economic and political systems. They can avoid Obama’s false choice between large troop deployments or a complete exit and instead propose a policy that would maintain a responsible role for the United States and keep both countries as allies, making sure that the wars of the last 10 years have not been in vain.

Critics commonly assert that the president went too far in the war on terror and individual liberties have suffered. But the Framers intended the Constitution to create a system where the branches of government would struggle over national security policy, and that is what we’ve seen the last 10 years. Also during that time, political speech and activity has exploded, thanks to the Internet, social media, and radio and cable talk shows. All that political debate has produced several changes in party control of the presidency and Congress, the real check on any abuses of power.

(Official White House photo)

President Obama’s administration is to be congratulated for the flawless execution of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.  Also, buried in the stories may be yet another sign of the vindication of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies. Anonymous government sources say that the al Qaeda courier who led our intelligence people to bin Laden was a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks who was captured in 2002, subjected to enhanced interrogation methods, and yielded a trove of intelligence on al Qaeda. Those same sources admit that interrogation of al Qaeda leaders, presumably by the CIA, yielded the identity of the courier. That identity was then combined into a mosaic of other information from other detainee interrogations, electronic intercepts, and sources in other countries, to eventually identify bin Laden’s hideout.

Without the tough decisions taken by President Bush and his national security team, the United States could not have found and killed bin Laden. It is the continuity of policies in the war on terror that has brought success, not the misguided effort of the last two years to disavow them.

These events are the inevitable consequences of President Obama’s naive decision two years ago: to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Apparently convinced by the anti-war Left’s irresponsible allegations of widespread abuse and torture at Gitmo, Obama surely believed that his decision would help our anti-terrorism efforts, by making the United States more popular abroad and removing a terrorism recruitment tactic.

Instead, Obama has produced the opposite result. While Congress has succeeded in keeping Obama from closing the base and transferring enemy prisoners to the United States for trial in civilian court, he has stopped the United States from bringing any more prisoners to Cuba. This creates a strong incentive, if not command, to the troops in the field not to capture any more terrorists. Not only does this mean that more people die—not just al Qaeda leaders but nearby innocent civilians—but we lose the information they might provide us. And that is the most valuable weapon in this war, for only by learning al Qaeda’s plans can we take action to preempt their attacks on the U.S. homeland.

Robert Bork’s criticism of Elena Kagan

Image by Harvard Law Record