For all the hoorah at the death of bin Laden a considered analysis of what bin Laden "achieved" in his lifetime - or perhaps more accurately brought about - cannot be ignored. The world will certainly never be the same - for a variety of reasons, not the least the wars which were triggered post 9/11.
"Bin Laden was a purveyor of chaos, a master of turning murder into spectacle. One can only hope, for the sake of our own sanity, that he was a madman. But, in certain respects, he also seems to have understood the nature of violence far better than the American foreign policy establishment. He understood how easily it slips and kicks out of any pretense of controlling it, and how addictive it can be for those who like to think of themselves as holding its reigns.
This was a lesson bin Laden first learned when, with US backing, he joined the mujahidin in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. It seemed to him, after the Soviet Union fell, that those nine years of costly fighting in Afghanistan brought down the superpower, militarily and economically. An insightful Foreign Policy retrospective reminds us of this:
'[B]in Laden has spoken of how he used “guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.” He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions—and these comparisons have been explicitly economic. For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujahidin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, “continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Similarly, in a September 2007 video message, bin Laden claimed that “thinkers who study events and happenings” were now predicting the American empire’s collapse. He gloated, “The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush.”'
The US economy, since 9/11, has gone from boom to bust, and from surplus to debt. Few dispute that the country seems to be lunging toward decline, at least by standards like the perception of its military abroad and the invincibility of its industry. China is sopping up the big contracts in Afghanistan. Yet there are more Coalition troops on the ground there now than ever, and less hope for any meaningful victory—except maybe for China.
Whether one approves of such an assassination or not, the “decapitation” strike against bin Laden last night only drives home how beside the point the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been. Bin Laden wasn’t hiding in a cave in Tora Bora. He certainly wasn’t consorting with Iraq’s Republican Guard. He was living, quite comfortably it seems, right under the nose of the Pakistani government, which has received billions of dollars in US military aid since 9/11. One wonders whether, absent the chaos of two distracting and self-destructive wars, finding the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks like bin Laden might have been easier—if, rather than blowing up the whole neighborhood, or the wrong neighborhood, the US and its allies had simply focused on finding the crooks.
Perhaps the only thing that can really count as good news about this, though, is how irrelevant bin Laden has become. The Arab Spring uprisings around the Middle East have shown that the way to create change for the better in that troubled region, and elsewhere, is neither chaotic terrorism nor superpower interventionism. It’s the power of ordinary people, standing up against unjust regimes peacefully, creating a future that refuses to accept the logic of violence, or to equate power with weapons. The protesters in Tahrir Square did more to defeat what Osama bin Laden represents in a few weeks than the whole US military and intelligence and political outfit has managed to do in nearly ten years
"Bin Laden was a purveyor of chaos, a master of turning murder into spectacle. One can only hope, for the sake of our own sanity, that he was a madman. But, in certain respects, he also seems to have understood the nature of violence far better than the American foreign policy establishment. He understood how easily it slips and kicks out of any pretense of controlling it, and how addictive it can be for those who like to think of themselves as holding its reigns.
This was a lesson bin Laden first learned when, with US backing, he joined the mujahidin in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. It seemed to him, after the Soviet Union fell, that those nine years of costly fighting in Afghanistan brought down the superpower, militarily and economically. An insightful Foreign Policy retrospective reminds us of this:
'[B]in Laden has spoken of how he used “guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.” He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions—and these comparisons have been explicitly economic. For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujahidin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, “continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Similarly, in a September 2007 video message, bin Laden claimed that “thinkers who study events and happenings” were now predicting the American empire’s collapse. He gloated, “The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush.”'
The US economy, since 9/11, has gone from boom to bust, and from surplus to debt. Few dispute that the country seems to be lunging toward decline, at least by standards like the perception of its military abroad and the invincibility of its industry. China is sopping up the big contracts in Afghanistan. Yet there are more Coalition troops on the ground there now than ever, and less hope for any meaningful victory—except maybe for China.
Whether one approves of such an assassination or not, the “decapitation” strike against bin Laden last night only drives home how beside the point the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been. Bin Laden wasn’t hiding in a cave in Tora Bora. He certainly wasn’t consorting with Iraq’s Republican Guard. He was living, quite comfortably it seems, right under the nose of the Pakistani government, which has received billions of dollars in US military aid since 9/11. One wonders whether, absent the chaos of two distracting and self-destructive wars, finding the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks like bin Laden might have been easier—if, rather than blowing up the whole neighborhood, or the wrong neighborhood, the US and its allies had simply focused on finding the crooks.
Perhaps the only thing that can really count as good news about this, though, is how irrelevant bin Laden has become. The Arab Spring uprisings around the Middle East have shown that the way to create change for the better in that troubled region, and elsewhere, is neither chaotic terrorism nor superpower interventionism. It’s the power of ordinary people, standing up against unjust regimes peacefully, creating a future that refuses to accept the logic of violence, or to equate power with weapons. The protesters in Tahrir Square did more to defeat what Osama bin Laden represents in a few weeks than the whole US military and intelligence and political outfit has managed to do in nearly ten years
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