India: Gutsy Obama

The Times of India

Gutsy Obama took a 55-45 chance shot at Osama
By Chidanand Rajghatta

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama took a daring and risky call to order a raid inside Pakistan despite being told it was only a 55:45 chance that the quarry was Osama bin Laden, it was revealed on Sunday.

In an extraordinary first-hand account of raid on the Abbottabad compound that resulted in killing the world's most-wanted terrorist, Obama told CBS 60 Minutes that he took the chance despite having only ''circumstantial evidence'' that it was bin Laden because he was driven by his campaign promise to nail Osama and his belief in the abilities of American commandos.

''At the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation,'' Obama explained with remarkable candor about the risk that most leaders may have abjured. ''I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been significant consequences.''

The US President mused that Washington would have had problems if the target had turned out to be a "wealthy prince from Dubai" instead of bin Laden, because "we're going into the sovereign territory of another country and conducting a military operation... so there were risks involved geopolitically in making the decision."

Still, he pressed ahead because he had "so much confidence in the capacity of our guys to carry out the mission that I felt that the risks were outweighed by the potential benefit of us finally getting our man," the President explained. Obama said he also "felt very strongly that there was a strategic imperative for us to go after him."

The US President didn't seem to think much of Pakistan's protests in the matter, and, in fact, seemed to believe bin Laden could not have survived for five years inside Pakistan without a "support network."

In explaining the sequence of events that led to the May 2 commando action inside Pakistan, Obama revealed an unusually high degree of involvement in the planning for a President, after he ordered the CIA to put in "more resources, more focus, more urgency" into the hunt for bin Laden.

Several months later, after tracking Osama couriers, "they had worked up an image of the compound, where it was and the factors that led them to conclude that this was the best evidence that we had regarding bin Laden's whereabouts since Tora Bora." Still, the evidence was largely circumstantial, Obama revealed, because US spooks could not get a clear sight of their quarry.

"The elements of the compound were structured so that nobody could see in. There were no sight lines that would enable somebody walking by or somebody in an adjoining building to see him. So it was clearly designed to make sure that bin Laden was protected from public view," the US President explained, in a disclosure that has surprised many who believed in the Untied States' much-vaunted satellite surveillance capabilities.

Obama revealed that his team gave himseveral options and made multiple presentations to him in the months and weeks and even days leading up to the raid even as he went about his normal schedule. He did not even tell his wife Michelle about the impending operation, he said, let alone sharing it with people he "didn't even know (viz. the Pakistani government)."

Obama, father of two young daughters, said the time of the operation was "the longest 40 minutes of my life with the possible exception of when Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old, and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right."

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Gutsy-Obama-took-a-55-45-chance-shot-at-Osama/articleshow/8208285.cms