Scramble the film backwards. Rewind. Go back to the day 10 years ago when the air here in Manhattan was thick with ash and Osama bin Laden was gloating. There were two options for the United States government -- to pick up a scalpel, or to pick up a blowtorch. With the scalpel, you go after the fundamentalist murderers responsible with patient policing and intelligence work, and steadily drain them of their support. With the blowtorch, you invade a slew of countries with a great blunderbuss of slaughter and torture -- and swell the army of enraged jihadis determined to kill. History branched in two possible directions that day.
We know which Osama bin Laden preferred. He wanted to draw the West into endless bloody wars that hemorrhaged billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. He told his supporters: "We conducted a war of attrition against Russia for 10 years until they went bankrupt. We are continuing in the same policy -- to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy." To achieve this, "all we have to do is send two mujahideen [to a remote, irrelevant area] and raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qa'ida' in order to make the [US] generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses." He knew that every ramped-up attack would appear to vindicate his narrative about the "evil" West waging "war on Islam" and swell his army of recruits.
When bin Laden's favorite son, Omar, defected, he told many unflattering stories about his father -- including that he tortured his pets to death. So it's highly unlikely to be a double bluff when he explained that the day George W. Bush was elected, "my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs -- one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country."
The West reacted to 9/11 by giving bin Laden precisely what he wanted. We tossed aside our best values, making them look like a hollow charade. And every time we did it more, the number of jihadis grew. The detailed studies by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank have found that the invasion of Iraq, and the torture used there, causeda seven-fold increase in jihadism globally.
Yet last weekend, we saw how it might have been. The operation wasn't perfect: I would much rather bin Laden had been taken alive and put on trial, rather than summarily executed. But it was a precise raid. It took real risks to minimize the deaths of civilians. It didn't use torture. Most people in the world can support an action like this. This should have been the primary -- and almost certainly sole -- use of violence in response to 9/11. Instead, over a million people have died in the torrent of aggression. They were just as innocent as the civilians in the World Trade Center, and their families will never get their day dancing in the streets in vengeance over the men who ordered it.
I wish I could say that this is the contrast between Bush and Obama -- but that wouldn't be honest. This raid was an anomalous moment in Obama's foreign policy. Most of the time it has been a clear continuation of Bush's -- and in several crucial areas, a ramping up of it. He has doubled the troops in Afghanistan. He has more than trebled the aerial bombardment of Pakistan and Yemen, even though it kills 50 civilians for every alleged jihadi -- and creates far more jihadis in the process. There is still no end in sight in Iraq -- where 50,000 U.S. troops remain, and Obama has canceled the deadline for bringing them home -- or in Afghanistan, where the war is entering its tenth year. Osama bin Laden is dead, but our foreign policy is still giving him what he wanted. We are still bleeding cash, creating bleeding countries and more enraged people.
Why? Even General David Petraeus, the new head of the CIA, says there are only 100 al Qaeda fighters in the whole of Afghanistan. One senior military official, speaking to theWashington Post, compared their intelligence on them to "Bigfoot sightings." Crunch the numbers, which the conservative writer George Will reported recently, and you find we are spending $1.5bn a year on each al Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan. Is there anyone alive, except the private defense contractors making a fortune, who thinks that is a sensible use of cash?
The angry, fighting people who really are in Afghanistan are -- according to leaked CIA reports -- simply "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders. It's not hard to see why they fight. The situation in Afghanistan is now so dire that even the president installed as a puppet by the U.S., former oil-man Hamid Karzai, has been reduced to begging the occupying forces: "Stop bombarding Afghan villages and searching Afghan people!" while publicly threatening to "join the Taliban."
The fear that the country will become a hive of "jihadi training camps" after a withdrawal is based on a basic fallacy. First, they don't need training camps. The 9/11 attacks were plotted in Hamburg and Florida using box-cutters. The 7/7 attacks were plotted in Yorkshire. Bin Laden was living in a mansion. Second, there will always be somewhere in the world to set up training camps -- from Somalia to Yemen to Pakistan. The logic of this position is to invade and indefinitely occupy all the world's most dangerous places -- bin Laden's plan to the letter.
Many people are angrily asking whether the Pakistani authorities knew about bin Laden's presence. But few people are asking how our governments' actions may have made this more likely. For the past three years, the U.S. -- with the support of her allies -- has been sending unmanned robot-planes swooping over the country, incinerating thousands of civilians and increasing jihadism. When the country experienced its worst floods in living memory, it was used as a pretext to increase the bombings. If that was happening in your country, would you be more or less likely to cooperate with the people attacking you?
If we want to be able to dump bin Ladenism at sea, rather than just his corpse, we need to stop pursuing the strategy of expensive aggression he longed for. For the past decade, right-wingers have been chest-thumping about being tough on jihadism, while promoting policies that create far more jihadis. It's like bragging about how much you hate lung cancer while demanding everybody smoke forty cigarettes a day.
If you really hate jihadism -- as I do -- then you need to search for the policies that actually undermine it. The single most important thing we can do to undercut the jihadis is to make a key structural change in our societies 0- by breaking our addiction to oil. Today, we need the petrol from the Middle East to keep the wheels of our civilization turning -- and that sets up an inevitably conflict. The people of the Middle East want to control their own oil, and spend the revenues on their own societies. We want to control the oil for ourselves. Only one can prevail. For our governments to win, they have to support the suppression of the Middle Eastern peoples, no matter how inspiring their democratic revolutions, and instead arm and fund their vilest tyrants, like the Saud crime family. This is going to create shards of violent hatred of us for as long as the policy continues.
As soon as the news of bin Laden's death broke, I headed to Times Square here in New York, and witnessed a scene that hinted at these complexities. A 28-year-old man was darting through the cheering crowds and the weeping fire-fighters selling the Stars and Stripes for $25 each. He was an Afghan refugee named Awal. He told me -- in fractured English -- that he had left "because of the war," which was "very bad", but he loved America "because here you are free." A drunk guy who was standing nearby overheard us and yelled with a smirk: "I'm a marine. I probably killed your cousin!" A few people sniggered; more scowled. Later, some of the crowd began to chant about the troops: "Bring them home! Bring them home!"
Who does al Qaeda really fear in this scene? If we follow the marine's course --- of more callousness and aggression and racist contempt -- the remaining scraps of al Qaeda may yet revive with new rage-recruits. If we follow the path of returning to sanity, they will wither. Bin Laden knew that. We know that. Now that he is gone, will we finally stop playing into his cold, dead hands?
Back in the 1960s, Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents aplan for dealing with the Vietnam War:declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it’s a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its tenth year.
As everybody not blind, deaf, and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has beeneliminated. Literally. By Navy Seals. Or as one of a crowd of revelers who appeared in front of the White House Sunday night put it on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead.”
And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home,” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were V-J day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.
Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.
Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely nonviolent protests that have shaken the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time Magazine has written, “little more than a historical footnote,” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.
Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos, and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighborhood.
The Tao of Terrorism
If analogies to The Wizard of Oz were in order, bin Laden might better be compared to that film’s wizard rather than the wicked witch. After all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast screen on which his frail frame took on, in the U.S., the hulking proportions of a supervillain, if not a rival superpower. In actuality, al Qaeda, his organization, was, at best, a ragtag crew that, even in its heyday, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacular and spectacularly murderous actions, but only one of them every year or two.
Bin Laden was never “Hitler,” nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions, though sometimes they were billed as such. The nearest thing al Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its “camps” were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about, not on a superpower scale anyway. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $400,000 to $500,000, which in superpower terms was pure chump change.
Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the U.S. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost 10 years wouldn’t have passed before he died or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?
It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice, but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet into a Pax Americana for decades to come. So if you’re writing bin Laden's obituary right now, describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks to magnify his meager powers many times over.
After all, while he only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington -- with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons, and troops at its command -- was capable of launching operations every day. In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires, the way a bot takes over a computer, and turning them to his own ends.
It was he, thanks to 9/11, who insured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who also insured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who brought America's Afghan war to Pakistan, and American aircraft, bombs, and missiles to Somalia and Yemento fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade, he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength, but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organization like his could thrive.Don’t be surprised, then, that in these last months or even years bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practicing the Tao of Terrorism. In fact, the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven.”
Dead and Alive
As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) -- from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world, where we were tocower in terror, while lashing out militarily.
In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument, and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).
At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on U.S. military operations, we still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100operatives in that country.
Now, he’s officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense, though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us.
When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.
For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners, and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others.
Those chants of “USA! USA!” on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, when President George W. Bush picked up a bullhorn and promised “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world of dismal unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure, rising gas prices, troubled treasury, and a people on the edge.
Unless we set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless we’re willing to follow the example of all those nonviolent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af/Pak theater of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.
On September 17, 2001, President Bush was asked whether he wanted bin Laden dead. He replied: “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said ‘wanted dead or alive.’” Dead or alive. Now, it turns out that there was a third option. Dead and alive.
The chance exists to put a stake through the heart of Osama bin Laden’s American legacy. After all, the man who officially started it all is theoretically gone. We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home. But why do I think that, on this score, the malign wizard is likely to win?
No comments:
Post a Comment