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, caused a 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 the Washington 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 -- 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?
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
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Rev. Chuck Currie: Osama Bin Laden Does Not Get To Hijack This Sunday
The question has two parts. Are bin Laden and Al Qaeda acting in accordance with Islamic law? Is Islamic law compatible with liberal democracy?
One side said that the perpetrators were common criminals who were attempting to hijack a peaceful religion for their own purposes. The people who believe this consequently believe that the solution is to try the perpetrators in criminal courts, and the problem is solved.
The other side said the perpetrators were following traditional Islamic guidance in carrying out defensive jihad. These people believe that a reformed Islam is the solution.
A third group has concluded that Islam is evil, unreformable, and must be destroyed.
Mr. Hari evidently believes option one is the case and police work is the answer.
Charles Krauthammer explains why this is not true:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/evil-does-not-die-of-natural-causes/2011/05/05/AFhTKG2F_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
See the "Pilgrim ship incident" section.
The Military Industrial Complex can not make money with a policy of sanity, so that is not going to happen any time soon.
Callousness and aggression and racist contempt makes the MIC cash registers ring.
There is funny and sad at the same time.
I have come to really look forward to your posts as they are always so smart!
We ask the Afghan government to support us and help find OBL, they say no. We surgically strike and/or assasinate their top officials. A new group of top officials take power. We ask the Afghan government to support... etc. etc. Eventually someone would have said 'yes.'
It's pretty evil I admit, but it's better than "Oh we are totally helping you foster democracy, now lets spend 10 years and kill thousands of civilians."
There are the leaders who pronounce the war.
And there are the soldiers who do the killing.
Each side labels the opposing side terrorists and morally wrong. Since the beginning of every war.
Labels are meaningless.
They consider themselves soldiers for their cause. We call them terrorists.
We send soldiers for our cause. They call us terrorists.
Whatever you call them, the soldiers of the cause do the killing.
These soldiers are never part of the ruling elite who issue these "declarations of war."
The soldiers come from the populace. And the great majority of these soldiers come from the poorest part of the society.
They are pointed at an enemy and told to shoot.
And they have to muster a required level of hatred in order to do the shooting.
Imagine if we as Americans were occupied by a righteous military in order to liberate us from our immoral existence.
We would fight back with everything we had.
Occupation makes hatred.
It's a great recruitment tool.
Let's get out of Afghanistan and stop giving the recruiters a platform.
Imagine we were invaded to liberate us from our immoral existence. We would fight back with everything we had.
But then,
Imagine that they defended themselves, tried their best not to hurt civilians, and systematically got rid of murderers, violent gangs, rapists, and child molesters.
Imagine that they helped us build our infrastructure while asking for our help to stop these evil people.
Imagine that during this time, the criminals escalated their misdeeds, and even started bombing our churches.
Imagine.
What population is actually immoral?
The great enemy? They see us as the Great Satan. Because, that's what their corrupt leaders encourage so that they can control them.
The same happens here. We see them as murderous muslims fanatics, when in fact only a minute percentage of their population is even interested in that garbage.
But that's how it's sold to us.
So, while you are imagining. Imagine that while our great liberators are defending themselves from our attacks, they are also killing hundreds of thousands of our civilians, and torturing prisoners, and raping our young girls.
Cause that's what we did to them.
Semper fi.
In the words of J. Burke (ISBN 1-85043-666-5, arguably the best research of this phenomenon):
"it is important to avoid seing Al-Qaeda as a coherent and structured terrorist organization, with cells everywhere, or to imagine it had subsumed all other groups within its networks. This would be to profoundly misconceive its nature and the nature of Islamic militancy. For example, bin Laden's group was only one of very many radical Islamic outfits operating in and from Afghanistan at the time. It had no monopoly of militant Islamic activism. [...] bin Laden's associates spent much of their time [...] selecting which of the miriad of requests for assistance they would grant. [...] They were requests for assistance with bomb attacks, assassinations and murder on a horrific scale. [...] Bin Laden's ability to co-opt groups ant to attract experienced militants and willing neophites [...] depended on the resources he could offer. With the loss of his bases in Afghanistan [...] those resources largely disappeared."
We are NOT fighting one man; we are NOT fighting "100 Al-Qaeda fighters"; Al-Qaeda is not an organization -- it is a concept. We are fighting a murderous supremacist IDEOLOGY. In the long run, we will defeat it with ideological weapons; in the short run, we need to deprive it as much as possible of the ability to hurt us.