McRaven explained that if a significant Pakistani force showed up before his men could get out, then there was going to be a gunfight. He didn’t want to get into that gunfight. His men would win it, but in the process lose the war. That scenario would give the Pakistanis the high moral ground. There were big political ramifications whenever American forces killed a single Pakistani soldier or policeman. They didn’t know for sure that bin Laden was there, after all. As soon as the admiral had brought more of his planning team in, he had told them that rule one was they were going to do everything conceivable to avoid killing Pakistanis. It had been a priority at every point in the planning. If they got in and out fast, there would be no problem, but he could readily imagine a scenario that might delay them. If they got on target and were not able to find bin Laden, but they thought he was there hiding from them, behind a false door or false wall—something they had encountered often—then what would they do? Did they just hop on the helicopters and leave? Suppose they had his wives and other key people who confirmed that bin Laden was there somewhere? The answer was no, they would not leave. They had come too far and were too close at that point to give up. At that point, they had to be prepared to strongpoint the compound and start tearing things apart until they found him. Which would mean overstaying their limit. There was a strong potential for that, perhaps even a likelihood, and every extra minute upped the chances of a confrontation with Pakistani troops.
“So at what point in time do you stop trying to find him?” McRaven asked hypothetically. “And now you are surrounded by Pakistanis, what do you do?”
The admiral’s answer was surprising. He recommended that if it came to that, his men would just hunker in and wait for Washington to work things out with Pakistan’s leaders.
“You go to them and say, ‘Okay, guys, this was the one we’ve been telling you about for umpteen years, that if he was there we were coming. Well he’s here. We haven’t killed anybody. We’re holed up. Let’s talk about this.’”
That, McRaven thought, might buy them thirty more minutes. After that, he wouldn’t be dealing with a local response, but with the entire Pakistani chain of command.
Here’s where the thinking of an admiral differed from the thinking of a president. As far as McRaven was concerned, his men could fight their way out of anything. There was a Quick Reaction Force nearby in case things got unexpectedly hairy. So they could fight their way off the compound. But then you had the rendezvous in Kala Dhaka, and then four American choppers flying out of Pakistani airspace, which was patrolled by F-16 fighters. Protecting the helicopters would now involve facing down the Pakistani air force. Again, this was something the U.S. Air Force could handle, with its superior fighters and air-to-ground capability, but… well, the fight would now be very sporty, indeed. The admiral thought this was a scenario to be avoided at all cost. After two years in Afghanistan, where the bulk of his force had moved from Iraq, he was acutely sensitive to the delicacy of the Pakistani relationship. It would not likely withstand a trail of dead Pakistanis and downed fighters and burning ground-to-air stations. So at the point where the raiding force inside the compound found itself surrounded, he suggested they should decline the fight. They would strongpoint the compound, hole up, and wait for Washington to work things out with Islamabad. They were, after all, American soldiers on a mission that Pakistan, ostensibly, supported… apprehending the world’s most wanted terrorist. Someone in the White House or at the State Department would then get on the phone with General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistani army chief of staff, or President Asif Zardari, and explain the situation. Ask, How do we extract ourselves from this without killing a lot of people? We don’t want dead guys; you don’t want dead guys. This is how McRaven imagined the conversation might proceed. The very fact that they preferred standing down to getting into a gunfight demonstrated that they intended no harm to Pakistanis and posed no threat to that nation.
The president saw it differently than the admiral. He was not going to have any such conversation with Pakistani authorities. Counterterrorism adviser Nick Rasmussen would later describe the president’s response to McRaven’s suggestion as “visceral.”
“I thought the possibilities of them being held, being subject to politics inside of Pakistan, were going to be very, very difficult,” the president explained to me. “I did not want to put them in a position of that kind of vulnerability.”
If he were going to deal with an outraged Pakistan, which he would have to do in almost any event, he would do it without a force of brave Americans in the middle.
Just days earlier, Obama had finally brought to a close the difficult wrangling over CIA contractor Davis, who had been released only after the United States agreed to pay $2.4 million to the families of the men he had killed. The incident had stirred up a small furor in Pakistan, where much of the public and the leadership was already fed up with American intrusions on their sovereignty—publicly, at least. Unofficially, the country’s top leadership was a lot more flexible, but there was only so far you could push them.
Where this mission was concerned, Obama wasn’t going to count on Pakistani goodwill, because there appeared to be little to spare. Like many countries in that part of the world, Pakistan’s leadership was less a coherent hierarchy than a collage of overlapping interests. Part of the art of managing that relationship was in balancing those interests. It was an important relationship. Most of the supplies and fuel for the American war effort in Afghanistan flowed across Pakistan’s border. Even though al Qaeda terrorists had taken refuge in the country’s northwestern territories and had the tacit sympathy of powerful factions in its leadership, the United States depended upon the government’s silent support to continue its drone campaign. And Pakistan was a nuclear power, a thing never to be forgotten. Its stability was vital to the security of not just the region but the world. With tempers in Islamabad already hot, imagine handing the Pakistanis a small force of elite American soldiers. Imagine trying to negotiate their exit with them trapped inside a compound with hostages or dead bodies, one of them quite possibly Osama bin Laden. The SEALs could all end up dead or held hostage. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
“And I also had confidence, based on my subsequent conversations with McRaven, that they could get out of there without engaging the Pakistani military,” the president explained. “There was a good enough chance of them being able to get in and get out, even if something went wrong, even if it wasn’t bin Laden, that they could hold off the Pakistani military, which we anticipated couldn’t respond faster than a certain period of time, so that the likelihood of a firefight erupting between the United States and Pakistani military was very slim. And in that situation, I just wanted to get them out of there, and then we would deal with the fallout knowing that those guys were back here safe.”