military. Taking the stage before us, the general told us our mission: to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. This time, he told us, we were serious. We had assembled the very best of America’s special operations community and would take advantage of a planned Pakistani military offensive in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to flush out and destroy Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. It was the spring of 2004, and the general before us was Stanley McChrystal, about to earn his second star. We were confident, having captured Saddam Hussein a few months prior and with the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan seemingly going well. We never got the chance to go after Osama bin Laden, though. A few weeks after we gathered in that airplane hangar, units from the Pakistani military marched into South Waziristan, clashed with Pakistani Taliban, and after negotiating their withdrawal, declared there to be no Al Qaeda in the FATA.1 The 2004 Shakai Agreement, as it came to be known, in which the Pakistani military largely acceded to the demands of the militants in the tribal areas, was a harbinger of things to come.
