[President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad in Pakistan by a US Navy SEALS team on 1 May, 2011]
It is all advertisement, after all.
How popular was bin Laden’s version of Islam?
Apparently, not very. Ten years ago, I argued that Al Qaeda and its affiliates were practically cornered by peaceful encroachment of the Free World, so they tried to provoke a clash of worlds by carrying out a series of spectacular and daring suicide attacks in a hope of provoking the US to act in a way that could be seen as blatantly anti-Islam. [US Naval Institute Proceedings, Dec. 2001, pp.50-51] When George W. Bush launched his War on Saddam, seeing the imperial manner in which he made the decision to go for it and overrode the wills of the public and the world, I feared that al-Qaeda almost won.
But it didn’t matter. No matter how many blunders the US has committed (thus the crime of the Bush administration is chiefly that of prolonging ‘War on Terror’), the fundamental landscape of the Islamic world was unchanged. As the second decade of the twenty-first century began, it exploded literally on Day 1, starting in the great ancient city of Alexandria with some sectarian violence. Within a month, the move towards a real change started in Cairo, and, as of now, the whole of the Middle East is up in flames. It’s not an American invasion or European colonialism. It is their own, home grown dictators and corrupt elite that are making their lives of ordinary Muslims a misery. Some of the elite used anti-Western rhetoric as a smokescreen for their mismanagement and tyranny. Others propped up their regime by acting as the only safeguard against al-Qaeda. Neither tactic will work any more.
The Muslims have now begun a new process of change by venting their pent-up anger at their own leaders. Tunisia and Egypt led the way with their spontaneous uprisings; unfortunately in Libya, the popular revolts are being turned into some sort of ancient, tribal war (the same problem the Carthaginians and the Romans had to deal with 2,000 years ago!). What is different this time is that the Libyans themselves asked for Western intervention. They knew better than blaming the West for their troubles. If anything, they are saying, why don’t you use your military power to help us for a change? The Muslims are so much wiser these days.
It is no wonder that this younger generation of Muslims, wised up by the Internet, will not listen to messages propagated by the ilk of al-Qaeda, who had been preaching to bomb foreigners instead of going to useless elections. But now they’ve discovered a more effective alternative: taking to the streets, rather than wasting their lives in something as prosaic as terrorism. Al-Qaeda-ism, as a protest movement, lost its appeal.
After the 911 attacks, the image of NYC engulfed by fire and smoke, and American citizens fleeing in terror helped inspire some new recruits. By being able to frighten the most powerful country, you can feel powerful. Such sense of power is intoxicating and gave some young Muslims who had nothing else to do something to devote their lives. What is terrorism to us is an adventure of lifetime to them.
But after a while, it is just a bunch of amateurish, ineffectual lone terrorists who were still fighting according to the spirit of al-Qaeda. The jihad has degenerated into a series of local, sectarian violence within the Islamic world, resulting in deaths and suffering of more Muslims than infidels. Some small, isolated jihadist groups might carry on their struggle against the West, but personally, when I fly, I’m more worried about mechanical failure or a bad weather than a bomb in the pants of a terrorist.
So what does al-Qaeda do? Bin Laden is described as charismatic [cf. numerous comments by experts who showed up on CNN,] but in reality, he was getting old and irrelevant. There is only one thing left for al-Qaeda: his martyrdom.
Thus I have this nagging feeling. This could be yet another ploy on the part of al-Qaeda trying to get attention. Did they allow US forces to kill Osama? Did they deliberately let him die a martyr’s death? If so and if this great piece of PR worked, they still might get a new lease of life, carrying out new attacks with fresh recruits bent on vengeance.
However, if they could keep up with the rest of the world, especially the Arab world, they might find it more productive not to use terror tactics at all. They’d been using violence to get noticed, and now that we are all aware of their presence and purposes, they can use violence in a more measured way, while their mainstream activities can be focused on waging a political warfare within Western societies, planting seeds of hatred and political dissent in the minds of young Muslims who live in immigrant communities. By design or accident, this is the latest trend in any case and we have to expect this to get more intense.
So, we are now entering a new phase of the al-Qaeda affairs. The killing of Osama bin Laden is in this sense symbolic. It’s the end of the beginning, if not the beginning of the end. The battleground is now on the arena of politics, rather than that of terrorism. It reminds me of Hitler transforming himself from a street thug to a politician. The enemy is elusive, and we cannot really hit them with the Predator or Navy SEALS teams in future. The hope is that more rational and intelligent political movements in the Islamic world will take hold and that they will use non-violent means to redress their grievances. The challenge is still ahead, as the problem of Palestine and social divide within the Islamic world are as deep as ever. In the meantime, oBama can concentrate on using the killing of oSama for his re-election campaign.
