The former Navy SEAL who claims to have fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 says the US military needs a new strategy in Afghanistan, where troops eight years later continue to fight America’s longest war.
“That’s a difficult question,” Robert J. O’Neill said in response to a Herald reporter’s inquiry about the Afghanistan War, while he attended a veterans event Sunday in Malden. “It’s definitely worth trying to defeat the radical ideology we’re up against.
“Having been to combat so many times, the 43-year-old Rob O’Neill is not as eager to go to war as the 27-year-old Rob O’Neill was,” he added. “There’s a lot of stuff out there that can’t be solved with bullets and bombs. I hope there’s a better way.”
His comments at Boston’s Wounded Vets Run Motorcycle Ride come after violent Taliban attacks last week in Kabul. Militants attacked an American-run contractor, killing nine people. Twenty others were wounded.
American officials in the last six months have met with the Taliban several times in order to reach a peace agreement and withdraw from Afghanistan, but those meetings have not been fruitful. President Trump in April called the war “unfortunate” and “ridiculous,” and numerous Democratic candidates for president are calling for the the US to end the conflict there.
O’Neill on Sunday cited education as a key in the Afghanistan strategy moving forward.
“It’s definitely worth trying to squash the ideology, but it’s also worth trying to educate people,” he said. “We can’t be raising children to hate off the bat. It’s worth being over there but we also need to evolve with what’s going on with the world.”
O’Neill first alleged that he had killed bin Laden in 2014, an announcement that the government has neither affirmed nor disputed. O’Neill’s initial plan — before that historic night in bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout — was to serve for 30 years in the Navy. Then everything changed after he shot the mastermind behind 9/11.
“Fifteen seconds after I shot Osama Bin Laden, one of my guys asked if I was OK,” O’Neill recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, what do we do now?’
“He said, ‘You just killed Osama bin Laden. Your life just changed. Now let’s get to work.’”
Now in the spotlight, he said he’s trying to help people who got injured in the wars, or who lost loved ones in the wars and on 9/11.
“There’s never gonna be closure for them, but it’s a healing process,” he said.
