Business Mistry: The $400 billion assassination of Osama bin Laden

The U.S. has spent more than $400 billion to ultimately seek and assassinate Osama Bin Laden, which was accomplished in Pakistan on May 1, 2011. This ongoing cost since 2001 as retribution for the attacks of 9/11 on the World Trade Centers, has lasted over a decade, and cost the lives of over 1461 American soldiers.

The ongoing cost of the conflict in Afghanistan, to seek and destroy both Al Queda and Taliban terror groups, can be found at a website which tracks the rolling cost of the war based on Congressional budget appropriations.

After 9/11, many Americans were in favor of our excursion into Afghanistan, much more than President Bush's decision to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. However, 10 years later, these same Americans are asking why we are still in occupation of the country, especially since in 2009 there were only believed to be 200 or less Al Queda remaining in Afghanistan.

Although the war in Afghanistan began as a response to al-Qaeda terrorism, there are perhaps fewer than 100 members of the group left in the country, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity. – CBS News

Besides the monetary and human costs of the war in Afghanistan, several other collateral costs have taken place because of our choices to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. Pakistan, which is an ally to the US in the war on terror, has had one leader removed, and another candidate for the Presidency assassinated. In fact, Presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto reported in interviews that not only was Osama Bin Laden dead, but she named the person who killed him in 2007.

Bhutto asserted to David Frost less than two months ago that bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh, whom the Sunday Times once described as "no ordinary terrorist but a man who has connections that reach high into Pakistan's military and intelligence elite and into the innermost circles" of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. (Watch video starting at 5:33 for mentioned part.) – Jazz from hell blogspot

Government officials will say that the war in Afghanistan was primarily about terror, and finding the groups that helped cause the attacks of 9/11. However, President George Bush in his memoirs written in 2010 specifically notes that failing to get Osama Bin Laden was a major regret of his term in office.

He regrets what he calls the unfinished business of Osama bin Laden. "I badly wanted to bring bin Laden to justice. The fact that we did not ranks among my great regrets. It certainly wasn't for lack of effort … while we never found the al-Qaida leader, we did force him to change the way he travelled, communicated and operated. That helped us deny him his greatest wish after 9/11: to see America attacked again." – The Guardian UK

The US has spent more than $400 Billion dollars in a decades long conflict in Afghanistan to serve the primary purpose of finding and killing Osama Bin Laden. While the mission also entailed killing Taliban and Al Queda resistance groups, and re-establishing order through nation building in the region, the symbol for the war was always Osama Bin Laden. His assassination on May 1st in Pakistan may be an end to a chapter on 9/11, but with the rising turmoil and chaos in the Middle East, and the growing debts of the Federal government, Americans need to ask if it was worth the price in both money and lives for just one man's death.