Opinion

Team O’s bragging

Nicholas Schmidle’s utterly compelling tale in The New Yorker — on the takedown of Osama bin Laden by an elite Navy commando team — was revealing in numerous ways.

Alas, one was quite troubling — in that it suggests Team Obama has elevated politics above US security interests.

That’s no exaggeration: Schmidle’s 8,400-word account, for starters, contained numerous operational details that may well prove valuable to America’s enemies in similar missions down the road.

More worrisome, though, is that the piece itself — produced with the help (and, most likely, encouragement) of top administration officials — amounts to yet another instance of imprudent Team Obama bravado.

And another unnecessary humiliation of Pakistan: It tells in precise detail how a team of Navy SEALs effortlessly penetrated that nation’s space, proceeded undetected to bin Laden’s lair, easily took him out and escaped unharmed — without Pakistani officials ever even knowing about it, until it was over.

Boo hoo for Pakistan, you say? Agreed. But it’s more complicated than that.

Yes, the raid was a remarkable undertaking — and a huge success for America. Pulling off a mission of such complexity, and risk, was no easy feat.

The upshot: a monumental blow to the terrorists, a boost to those fighting them and some exquisite payback for 9/11.

As Schmidle notes, the outcome was never certain: Some analysts and officials vetting the mission’s plans had as little as 40 percent confidence in the intelligence underpinning it. No one was sure if bin Laden was even there.

Meanwhile, the potential downside — a failure, such as when special forces went to rescue US hostages in Iran in 1980 — would have been devastating.

Bottom line: President Obama deserves tremendous credit.

For taking the risk — and
and succeeding.

But a more mature administration would have let the deed speak for itself. This one’s been rubbing Pakistan’s nose in its humiliation almost since bin Laden’s body hit the bottom of the North Arabian Sea.

On one level, deservedly so: Bin Laden had been living on its soil (in a military town, no less) practically in plain sight. How could Islamabad not have known?

Yet Pakistan is an extraordinarily unstable, nuclear-armed nation located in arguably the most volatile region on the planet. Anything that exacerbates Pakistan’s instability is to be avoided — and Team Obama shouldn’t have to be reminded of that. It’s really time to quit with the victory laps.