The endgame the president should care about.

"I don't care," President Bush said last weekend. "Dead or alive, either way. I mean, it doesn't matter to me." I don't know if the president was being disingenuous about Osama Bin Laden's fate or just insufficiently thoughtful, but in fact it's not an obvious question whether we want him dead or alive, and it's complicated by the wrinkle that, in a landscape of caves and tunnels, we might not know whether we've killed him or not. Thus there is a subsidiary question of if we want it known whether he is dead or alive—and if so, what price we are willing to pay for that knowledge.

Think of it as a 2-by-2 matrix in which we get to choose both the row (is he dead?) and the column (do we know it?):

Known dead       Unknown dead

Known alive        Unknown alive

So, how do we rank these preferences? In terms of his own power to make further trouble for the world, it almost doesn't matter whether he's dead, alive but in custody, or alive and holed up somewhere. The advantage of his being dead is that it would spare us the many problems of having to try and punish him. It would also be a valuable propaganda victory in the larger war against terrorism, and would be discouraging if not fatal to what is left of OBL's own worldwide terror network. That, of course depends on his being known to be dead. So KD is the most obvious first choice.

Why wouldn't we want him dead or want that to be known? Some people think that putting him on trial would be a useful or noble enterprise—and perhaps don't believe in the death penalty even in this case. For these folks, the best outcome is KA.

A more interesting argument is that OBL's death will actually be a propaganda negative—not because anyone will mind very much, but because it will stop the flow of domestic political adrenaline, cause people to lose interest, and diminish the sense of urgency that has held together the worldwide anti-terror coalition. For people who think this way, the first choice might be UD.

A very different group of people might also favor UD: military folks. That's because they know that knowledge comes at a price. It's a lot less costly in terms of soldiers' lives to kill only those enemy fighters holed up in caves who are shooting at us, than to find out who was at one time or another in every last one of them but was not shooting. Is that extra knowledge worth, say, 20 American lives? Ten? If our military objective is accomplished and there's an overwhelming likelihood that one of the unidentifiable or unreachable bodies is OBL's, many soldiers would say that's good enough. Don't make me die for a photograph.

This conundrum is similar to something military commanders have experienced before, whenever they have known they were in danger of leaving dead on the battlefield. They have to ask themselves if exposing live soldiers to hostile fire purely to recover dead ones makes military sense. And surely, sometimes, given the overall combat situation, it does not.

And is there any argument for UA—Bin Laden's fate is unknown but he's actually alive? It's an obvious second choice for those who want him dead-cert dead. But the only person who might make it his first choice is OBL himself.