Can Obama Catch Osama bin Laden?
President-Elect Plans to Renew U.S. Commitment to Finding Al-Qaeda Leader
Obama: 'We Will Kill Bin Laden'
If bin Laden is captured or killed, what isn't known is how his followers around the world will react.
"I think it would be a key transformative political event because of the symbolic importance of it," said Samuel Brannen, an international security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
"But we don't even know what it would really do. Would he be a martyr or would this be a leaderless movement?"
During his campaign for the White House, Obama pledged to end the war in Iraq and renew the nation's focus on bin Laden and Afghanistan, arguing the Bush administration's focus on Iraq diverted resources away from the war on terror.
"We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda," Obama promised during an Oct. 7 debate. "That has to be our biggest national security priority."
But putting more troops in Afghanistan won't relieve the overall strain on U.S. military forces and their families.
"It looks like Obama's focus is on putting the bulk of the troops in Afghanistan, with a smaller operation in Iraq, which is really just his and President Bush's policies flipped," Brannen said.
Currently there are 31,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan. NATO forces represent about another 30,000 troops.
'Afghanistan Is the Graveyard of Empires'
The challenges facing the U.S. in Afghanistan are daunting: keep the increasingly unpopular Karzai government in power, rebuild the Afghan economy and build a communications and transportation infrastructure.
More important, the U.S. and allies have the task of trying to find and destroy al Qaeda, eradicating the world's largest heroin industry and trying to defeat the Taliban, which has established a base in Pakistan, the Muslim world's only nuclear-armed arsenal.
"Al Qaeda's base in Pakistan is the single most important factor today in the group's resilience and its ability to threaten the West," Hayden said.
Baer argues sending more troops into Afghanistan "is a huge mistake" that could escalate the problem.
"It's going to push the chaos into Pakistan," Baer said. "The cliché is, Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires."
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