Osama bin Laden's actions, and our reactions to them, have defined my adult life. I was in New York City on September 11th, 2001, a senior in college. After the towers collapsed, I walked 95 blocks to get as close to Ground Zero as possible, so I could see first-hand the destruction that would define our future. By the time I got to Baghdad four years later, very few Americans believed that the people we were fighting in Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Even the military press didn't bother lying about it anymore, referring to our enemies as  insurgents  rather than  terrorists.  A woman I loved was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 - Al Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it - and my younger brother fought for 15 months as an infantry platoon leader, earning a Bronze Star. Other friends, both American and Iraqi, suffered their own losses: homes, limbs, loved ones.

By the fall of 2008, when I had moved on to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Al Qaeda were barely footnotes to what we were doing there.  It's not about bin Laden,  a military intelligence official told me.  It's about fixing the mess.  This added to the growing despair Americans felt about the war: If it wasn't about bin Laden, then what the fuck was it about? Why were we fighting wars that took us no closer to the man responsible for unleashing the horror of September 11th? A top-ranking military official told me last year that he didn't think we'd ever get bin Laden. Yet each time our presidents and generals told us why we were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they always used bin Laden and September 11th as an excuse. As long as they insisted on fighting these wars we didn't need to fight, the wound to the American psyche wasn't allowed to heal.

Read  The Runaway General,' the Rolling Stone profile of Stanley McChrystal that changed history, by Michael Hastings Editor's picks

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