On September 11, Salon.com published a piece by Philadelphia radio talk show host and columnist, Michael Smerconish, in which he described his continued frustration with the apparent abandonment of the mission to hunt down Osama bin Laden:

"We're at the seven-year anniversary of 9/11, lacking not only closure with regard to the two top al-Qaida leaders but also public discourse about any plan to bring them to justice. To me, that suggests a continuation of what I perceive to be the Bush administration's outsourcing of this responsibility at great cost to a government with limited motivation to get the job done."

Smerconish is referring to Pakistan and the billions of dollars in aid that the US has sent to General Musharaff to arm his military regime for the purpose of fighting al-Qaida and finding Osama bin Laden - a goal that has yet to be realized and has seemed to be of diminishing importance:

"On May 20, 2007, the [New York] Times reported that we were paying $80 million a month to Pakistan for its supposed counterterrorism efforts, for a total of $5.6 billion.

In July 2007, a National Security Estimate concluded that the failure of Musharraf's accord with warlords in Pakistan's tribal areas had allowed bin Laden's thugs to regroup there. On July 22, National Intelligence director Adm. Mike McConnell said on "Meet the Press" that he believed bin Laden was in Pakistan in the very region Musharraf had ceded to the warlords."

Similar criticism was aired in several other publications in 2007, including the Los Angeles Times:

"Despite billions of dollars in U.S. military payments to Pakistan over the last six years, the paramilitary force leading the pursuit of Al Qaeda militants remains underfunded, poorly trained and overwhelmingly outgunned, U.S. military and intelligence officials said.

But rather than use the more than $7 billion in U.S. military aid to bolster its counter-terrorism capabilities, Pakistan has spent the bulk of it on heavy arms, aircraft and equipment that U.S. officials say are far more suited for conventional warfare with India, its regional rival."

In short, not only is the US sending billions of dollars to Pakistan - in addition to fighting a war in Iraq that's funded by supplementary appropriations, not through the annual defense budget - but the money's being spent on conventional armaments, not counter-terrorism supplies and training. Is it any wonder that our country's budget is in tatters and Osama bin Laden is still at large?

But Smerconish's point is that it's this issue that may convince him - a lifelong Republican - to vote for Barack Obama:

"Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets, and President Musharraf won't act, we will," he said.

"We can't send millions and millions of dollars to Pakistan for military aid, and be a constant ally to them, and yet not see more aggressive action in dealing with al-Qaida."

Finally, I thought, a presidential candidate saying something about this foreign-policy failure."

On September 12, the day after Smerconish's article, NPR reported that "[a] raid by helicopter-borne U.S. Special Operations forces in Pakistan last week was not an isolated incident but part of a three-phase plan, approved by President Bush, to strike at Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida leadership... The plan represents an 11th-hour effort to hammer al-Qaida until the Bush administration leaves office," confirming what Smerconish had alluded to in his piece - that the raid "might represent the early stages of a more dedicated and aggressive American presence in Pakistan in the wake of Gen. Musharraf's resignation."

But as both Smerconish and the NPR piece asked, shouldn't we have taken matters into our own hands sooner? Or at the very least, done more to verify Pakistan's commitment to ousting al-Qaida from within its borders? While it's a stretch to state that Pakistan has been harboring Osama bin Laden, as Smerconish hints in his opening paragraph, it's quite evident that the aid sent by the US hasn't generated the desired results and has in fact likely been misused.

Would an Obama administration be more determined than a McCain administration to go after Osama bin Laden by any means necessary, including potentially alienating Pakistan? Would such a consequence be more or less dangerous to the US than bin Laden remaining at large? Or is it possible that this new Bush administration plan will succeed in finally capturing bin Laden?

Even if bin Laden is brought to justice on the Bush administration's watch, the question poised by NPR will still remain: "Why wasn't this done a year ago?"