Wasn't Bin Laden the reason we went to war?

The killing of the al-Qa'ida leader offers an opportunity to make long overdue progress on Afghanistan

8 May 2011 - Does the death of Osama bin Laden open the door for the US and UK to escape from the trap into which they have fallen in Afghanistan? At first sight, the presumed weakening of al-Qa'ida ought to strength the case for an American and British withdrawal. When President Obama ordered the dispatch of an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009, he declared that the goal was "to deny safe-haven to al-Qa'ida and to deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government".

This justification for stationing 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan and for Washington spending $113bn (£69bn) a year always looked thin. By the US army's own estimate there are about 100 members of al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan compared with an estimated 25,000 Taliban. Even on the Pakistan side of the border, al-Qa'ida probably only has a few hundred fighters.

A problem for the US and Britain is how to dump this convenient but highly misleading explanation as to why it was essential for the safety of their own countries to fight a war in Afghanistan. This has required pretending that al-Qa'ida was in the country in significant force and that a vast US and UK military deployment was necessary to defend the streets of London or the little house on the prairie.

The death of Bin Laden reduces this highly exaggerated perception of al-Qa'ida as a threat. People, not unreasonably, ask what we are doing in Afghanistan, and why soldiers are still being killed. One spurious argument has been to conflate al-Qa'ida and the Afghan Taliban, and say they are much the same thing. But it is difficult to think of a single Afghan involved in bomb attacks against targets in the US and Britain before and after 9/11. Al-Qa'ida's leadership was mainly Egyptian and Saudi as were all the 9/11 bombers. {continued}