The decision must have been beyond agonizing.

Option A: A breathtakingly risky undertaking that would place Navy SEALs inside Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout.

Option B: Carpet-bombing the terrorist’s compound, and letting God sort out the results.

President Obama took the risk, as did the young warriors of SEAL Team 6, who flew into the compound and came out with the body of the man behind 9/11 — neat, clean and with only the tin-foil-hat crowd questioning the outcome.

“It was a good day for America,” said Obama yesterday.

Indeed.

So three cheers for the president.

Credit Obama also for laying aside politics and seeing value in many of the Bush-era policies he criticized during the 2008 campaign. Keeping Gitmo open and using coercive interrogation techniques paid substantial strategic dividends.

Obama also held on not only to many of George W. Bush’s national-security policies but also to members of his team — like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, architect of the successful 2007 troop surge in Iraq, who has just been named CIA director.

The president, in other words, chose policy continuity over partisan advantage-taking, and the result was two bullets in Osama’s head — a very good day’s work.

Still, questions remain:

* Has Pakistan been pretending to participate in the hunt for bin Laden — taking billions in US cash and arms while protecting him all along?

Certainly Pakistan’s intelligence service had to know that Osama had been hiding since 2005 in a super-secure compound in Abbottabad, a major city.

Despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s thanks for Pakistan’s “cooperation” in putting pressure on al Qaeda, evidence suggests that bin Laden was there under Pakistani state protection. The city hosts three army regiments, and the compound was a stone’s throw from the Pakistan Military Academy — the country’s equivalent of West Point.

Washington has long suspected that Pakistani officials knew of Osama’s whereabouts — their denials notwithstanding. Just two weeks ago, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that Pakistani ties to Osama’s Taliban allies were straining Washington-Islamabad relations.

Indeed, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee yesterday charged that “at least a dozen” of the top 20 al Qaeda commanders are “traveling around Pakistan someplace.”

That includes bin Laden’s No. 2 and presumed successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.

Which is why Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman warned that “there is going to be a time of real pressure” on Pakistan to “prove to us that they didn’t know bin Laden was there.”

* Will bin Laden’s death accelerate a US pullout from Afghanistan?

“The fight continues, and we will never waver,” said Clinton, adding that the United States would continue “relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people.”

But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, predicted that Obama will enact a “robust reduction” in US troops — a decision, he said, that is “reinforced by events.”

That would be a profound mistake.

The US has made significant progress in Afghanistan, which is no longer a ter rorist haven controlled by the Taliban.

But if the administration follows through with a “robust” — i.e., precipitous — troop withdrawal under the cover of Osama’s death, Afghanistan would almost certainly slip back to a position where the Taliban would re-emerge.

That would be more than just allowing the terrorists to win; it would be giving the ghost of Osama bin Laden the last word on what happens in Afghanistan.

America simply can’t allow that to happen.