Death of an individual or an institution?

The only certainty in Osama bin Laden’s demise is the end of just one individual—Osama bin Laden, who achieved iconic status being on the US’s “most-wanted” list for nearly a decade after the events of 9/11. The rest will merely be a subject of speculation and debate for a long time to come.

It is ironic that Bin Laden’s death coincided with the Middle East’s most significant political turmoil in recent history. More ironic is the fact that he was killed in Pakistan, which had repeatedly refuted that he was hiding in its territory, and at a time when Pakistan-US ties had hit the nadir following the recent drone attacks-induced civilian causalities and the CIA agent Raymond Davis affair.

Most ironic, however, is the timing of his death in the context of American politics—the Democrats fared badly in the 2010 mid-terms polls largely due to economic factors and US President Barack Obama has just announced his candidature for a second term.

Ironies aside, looking back at 9/11, bin Laden and Al Qaeda, with which his name was synonymous, one of the positives that emerged was the opening up of the peoples’ mindsets and society’s views on religious issues in the region. A limited, yet new, process of introspection into extremism and a willingness to accommodate moderate views emerged.

The last decade has witnessed several attempts at reforming the socio-politico-economic institutions in several Middle Eastern countries, a movement that has been unmatched by any other in the past. Though there is ample evidence of moderates and reformers rearing their head and airing their views in public, it is still the extremists who call the shots. Elections over the last 10 years—wherever and in whatever form they were held—have always benefited religious groups. It would be interesting to see if Bin Laden’s death would roll back, stagnate or hasten this process of introspection and transformation.

What would be even more interesting is how factors such as the public’s mood against extremism in their backyard, need to defend their religion against Western slurs and their quest for freedom and democracy, would intersect with the push for “new” politics in the region.

From the US’s perspective, rather than rejoice and take credit for this “first and real” success in its 10-year war against terror, it is an opportune time for contemplation.

A glaring gap in the US’s anti-terror strategy has been the failure to make political capital of its military might, which made the world a victim of terrorism rather than a beneficiary of peace as propagated initially. Whether this gap was unintended, miscalculated or deliberately conceived by Washington is again subject to debate.

While the world is yet to reach a consensus on the definition of terrorism, a certainty, however, is that the 9/11 attacks were not–as the United States claimed–the culmination of Al Qaeda’s long-term planning. In fact, it was the beginning of Al Qaeda’s long-term plan to drag the United States into a prolonged battle that would showcase Washington’s biased views, inhuman action and hegemonic ideology. The coincidental economic slump thereafter could be construed as “unintended collateral damage.”

The war against terror may have insulated the United States from major attacks after 9/11, but it opened the “gates of hell” in several other countries, resulting in extensive civilian casualties and political-economic-social turmoil that easily overshadow the damage accrued by the United States.

Further, the war on terror, which was a strategy to keep away “enemies of America” from exporting hatred, turned the Middle East into a battleground, where the adversaries were no longer the United States and extremists, but the regional governments and extremists.

Three years after 9/11, President George W. Bush said that more than three-quarters of Al Qaeda’s key members and associates had either been detained or killed or were on the run. By this logic, the threat of terrorism should have diminished considerably another six years later.

However, according to a August 2010 US government report on terrorism, 14,971 people died in 10,999 different terrorist attacks around the world in 2009, which was down from the 2006 high of 22,736 killed in 14,443 attacks. Statistics in such reports in the future would help assess the real impact of bin Laden on Al Qaeda in particular and terrorism in general.

While poverty and lack of political freedom have often been cited as factors encouraging terrorism, the presence of the “wealthy” bin Laden, Egyptian medical doctor Ayman Al Zawahiri, Malaysian engineer-academic Azahari Husin and American-Yemeni Anwar Al Awlaqi indicate that the problem of terrorism is all-pervasive.

In this scenario, bin Laden’s death is unlikely to severely dent Al Qaeda’s activities. This is largely because of the fragmentation of the Al Qaeda network into small units in several countries around the world. There have been far too few or no cases of bin Laden being directly linked to any terrorist act after 9/11, whether they occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Morocco, Kuwait, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Britain or elsewhere.

Over the last 10 years, bin Laden was a symbolic figurehead, whose ideology was championed by many totally unconnected with the main Al Qaeda network.

Similarly, even after his death, bin Laden is likely to remain an inspiration to youth, individuals and groups who swear by terror to achieve their political, religious and personal goals. It would be unwise to expect such entities to abandon a well-cultivated and well-recognized brand name in Al Qaeda and shut shop overnight.

It is logical to argue that any counter-offensive against terror, such as the one resulting in Bin Laden’s death, is bound to see an upswing in terror-related events in the foreseeable future, before it slumps in the medium and long term. But this cannot be an absolute. If the one-way military road to solving terrorism continues into medium and long terms, there could well be no lull at all.

Thus, until the pre-9/11 grievances and shortcomings are not objectively assessed, the damage caused by US’s post-9/11 policies are not effectively addressed, there is no positive movement on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process and the social-political-economic-religious systems in the region do not transform suitably, bin Laden’s demise will signify the end of just one individual, not the cause, institution or ideology he espoused, which many others followed.

(Dr. N. Janardhan is a UAE-based political analyst, and author of “Boom Amid Gloom – The Spirit of Possibility in the 21st Century Gulf” (Ithaca Press), scheduled to be released in mid-2011. He can be contacted at [email protected])