Osama bin Laden must be laughing from his watery grave. In announcing a new policy of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he mockingly declared in a 2004 video that "It is easy for us to provoke and bait. ... All that we have to do is to send two mujaheddin ... to raise a raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaida' in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."
The simple and simplistic answer to the question of how much it cost the United States finally to find and kill bin Laden is a few million dollars for equipment, fuel and write-off of a helicopter plus months of careful planning. The political bill, in relations with Pakistan, may take longer to come in.
However, the alarming longer answer is that it has cost more than $1 trillion, and maybe as much as $3 trillion to $5 trillion if all the costs are properly accounted of the "war on terrorism." Bin Laden is dead, but those costs continue rolling on, and raise huge questions about the financial and economic competence of the U.S. government, not to mention its political priorities.