Obama?s post-bin Laden opportunity

The big news right now is that President Obama told ?60 Minutes? that he won?t release the photographs of Osama bin Laden?s corpse. It shouldn?t be. The story that really matters today is Rajiv Chandrasekaran?s report that ?the Obama administration is seeking to use the killing of Osama bin Laden to accelerate a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and hasten the end of the Afghanistan war.? That the administration wants to use bin Laden?s death as a way to withdraw from Afghanistan is big, big news.

I don?t want to downplay the important of killing Osama bin Laden. But for all his symbolic importance, he was one man, and he was exerting less and less control over a less and less potent terrorist organization. Killing him was a gamechanger, but not because al-Qaeda will crumble into dust, or because we?re so much safer today than we were a month ago. Killing him was a gamechanger because it opens space for major shifts in American foreign policy. It allows the Obama administration to declare victory in the war on terror and chart a new course. The big question is whether the Obama administration will choose to do so.

The obvious questions relate to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but consider a slightly less obvious, but nevertheless important, issue: defense spending. As you can see in the graph atop this post (source), defense spending jumped by almost 50 percent after Sept. 11 ? and that?s not counting the trillion or so dollars (pdf) we?ve spent increasing the homeland security budget. I?m not even sure it includes direct war spending, most of which has been passed in special funding vehicles rather than normal defense appropriations. All in all, that?s a lot of money.

The Simpson-Bowles report called for about $800 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. The Obama budget asked for less than half that. If White House officials were staying their hand because they didn?t want to be accused of being weak on defense, they just bought themselves leeway to cut further. Similarly, if the White House wanted to kick off a significant reassessment of how our military is structured and used, this would be a good time for that, too. Bin Laden?s execution creates a natural hinge point for the Obama administration to reorient our defense policy, spending, etc. ? to create policy based on the world as it looks in 2011, rather than the world as it seemed in 2002. Chandrasekaran?s article suggests it wants to take that opportunity on Afghanistan. The question is whether it wants to take it elsewhere, too.

Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=783c3ed55bcc742c3c2803aba1889a14

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