The Outsider

Like many other viewers, I tuned in to CBS's 60 Minutes program to watch President Obama describe the most stressful 40 minutes of his presidency. I listened to him explain his decisions to CBS's Steve Kroft in the Roosevelt Room. There were many interesting things the President mentioned (carrying on with routine things like the White House Correspondents' Dinner and so on), but one thing stuck in my mind. It was this exchange, where President Obama explained witholding information about the operation from the Pakistani establishment.

KROFT: You didn't trust 'em?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: If I'm not revealing to some of my closest aides what we're doin', then I sure as heck am not gonna be revealing it to folks who I don't know.

And that summed up to me why it took an Obama to nail Osama. No, not because Obama is a superhuman or a saint or a god**mn tactical genius. Nor is it because he likes to shoot from the hip. Rather, it's because Barack Obama is an outsider. He has nothing invested in maintaining networks of spy contacts in Pakistan, he has no relationships built up over decades with the Pakistani military and intelligence outfits. Donald Rumsfeld (who still calls for the US-Pakistan relationship to be safeguarded), and Dick Cheney spent the 1970s cultivating the Pakistani establishment, and were reluctant to throw away all that history by breaking with those relationships. Instead, they hoped that coaxing and cajoling the Pakistani establishment with aid and armaments would both deliver Osama bin Laden and safeguard a relationship that had been fathered by the ideological necessities of the Cold War, i.e. anticommunism. This led predictably to the (greedy and corrupt) Pakistani establishment milking the relationship for all it was worth, while never delivering the top symbol of the War on Terror. If the Pakistani security outfits had delivered OBL rightaway, they would have lost their golden goose. So the War on Terror continued for years, while terror alerts in the US changed colors with the season, and bin Laden continued to remain a hidden force, emerging occasionally to lecture and harangue the world via videotapes.

Obama , when he took charge, was least concerned about hurting the feelings of the Pakistani High Command. He had not toured Pakistan as a government official but as a backpacking student. He had no links to the inner, twisted corridors of Pakistani power. In turn, the Pakistani High Command probably dismissed Obama as a lightweight, did not see the point in currying favor with him or his administration of political novices, and were keeping bin Laden safe, waiting out the four years until a Republican administration with familiar faces returned and picked up the threads of an old and familiar relationship.

Neither the Pakistanis or the American Old Guard (in which I include Democrats of a certain vintage) reckoned with the fact that Obama was an outsider who would break with the past in foreign policy. Unlike other outsiders like Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee who are combative about domestic politics but quite unsure about foreign policy (and therefore dependent on the old guard for guidance), Obama is willing to think independently. Because a seriously-cheesed-off Pakistani military means absolutely nothing to him. He is an outsider.