Editorial

Leveraging the death of Osama bin Laden

Announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama was notably restrained. No triumphal claims about 'Mission Accomplished', no gloating over the death nor the means of achieving it.

He was well advised to be statesman-like, for the passing of this human being, though welcomed in many parts of the world, in reality achieves nothing except the temporary satisfaction of the lust for revenge.

Even that must leave many with appetites unsated because what they saw in the post-strike images was an old man, holed up in a suburban house with wives and children; hardly the all-powerful commander of an enemy with seemingly limitless power to harass and destroy the world's only superpower and its allies across the globe.

But that was, in part, due to the American determination to demonise the individual when the problem was far more complex than an American posse out to get the outlaw who has been harassing and robbing 'the peace-loving folk down on the farm'.

The reality is that when the American Seals arrived uninvited at Osama's villa, the resident patriarch was already history as far as the only people who really matter in this whole, sorry saga are concerned: the ordinary people of the Middle East who are taking care of their future by taking to the streets and demanding change in their daily lives. No-one was waving placards urging: 'Obama leave Osama alone' or 'Osama for president'. Not for them bogus claims to be the inheritors of the Islamic future with plans for the establishment of a new caliphate.

Of course there is validity in the claims that the West, as leaders of the modern global power structure, has taken advantage of the weakness and corrupt nature of the leadership of many of the Arab nations with access to oil wealth; but the protesters in Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli and Damascus have elected to look forward and take the Westerners at their word and use the tools they so highly value, democracy and freedom, to shape a new future.
That way they can reclaim the heritage that they believe has been taken from them, leveraging the strength of the West's beliefs and institutions to begin to level the playing field.

Bin Laden's gamble in taking on the West head on would only have worked had he succeeded in bringing the Arab masses with him in some kind of collective 'kamikaze' operation. That would not have been successful — trying to defeat ideas with force — just as the NATO nations are finding once again in Afghanistan.

But the death of Osama does provide an opportunity for the West and the countries of West Asia to re-assess just what they are doing in the region and where they should go from here.

The American president has said that he retains the right to go after other so-called 'high value' targets in the radical Islamic movement, al-Qaeda, that Osama led. And this is where the American strategy becomes both puzzling and contradictory. With peace talks with the Taliban under way in Europe through proxies, the United States is trying to bring an end to its troubled military operations in Afghanistan. Even if one can divorce the Taliban and al-Qaeda completely in the Afghan context, which seems unlikely, how is threatening to kill other leaders of the al-Qaeda leadership, the rival organization for American attention, going to improve the atmosphere for negotiations? All this harks back to American policy in Vietnam, when the administration spoke of 'bombing the Vietnamese back to the negotiating table'. It didn't work then and is unlikely to work now: the Vietnamese were going nowhere and the Americans wanted to go home. Today the Taliban are going nowhere and the Americans want to go home — plus ça change.

To gain the most advantage from Osama's demise, Britain and America need to heed the message from their electorates and make plans to speed up the withdrawal of their troops. Hamid Karzai doesn't particularly want the West running his country. NATO and the EU have done their poor best to set the country on a more secure and profitable path but time and again their presence seems only to excite further activity by the Taliban. The president signalled far in advance that he wanted out; the Taliban knows the outsiders are leaving sooner or later so perhaps it will concentrate minds to go sooner.

The struggle with Islamists in Pakistan is a separate issue, though the two are linked. Further attempts to kill al-Qaeda leaders on Pakistani soil are ill-advised for another important reason: they could help bring about the very thing everyone hopes to avoid, the collapse of Pakistan. Here regional countries, such as India, can help by removing some of the justifications that al-Qaeda in Pakistan uses for its campaign.

Instead of sitting back in a glow of moral superiority and pontificating about the Pakistani state's shortcomings, Delhi must move to take Kashmir off the Islamist agenda by allowing a degree of autonomy and settling on the Line of Control as the national demarcation line. Kashmir is a powerfully iconic issue for Pakistan's Muslims, and Islam internationally, and it needs to be eliminated as part of a scheme that will help India as well as Pakistan.

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