It is time to bury the war on terror
Gesturing at the dazed and bloodied survivors sitting crumpled in the road, a bystander asked: "How can someone think of doing this kind of thing?" In the two decades that followed the car bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the answer to that question was to become terrifyingly clear. To the relatives of the thousands of lives he destroyed, the answer was intimate. To those elected to govern them it was a test of credibility. Osama bin Laden was the author of the most catastrophic attack on US soil since the second world war, and for those who gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at Ground Zero, laughing, chanting and singing The Star-Spangled Banner, news of his death brought relief. Barack Obama, the third US president to have vowed to hunt their nemesis down, talked repeatedly of justice being done. Anyone who has passed a fire station in New York and seen the memorial plaques to the firefighters who died on 11 September 2001 cannot fail to appreciate the deep scar America still bears. Vengeance was theirs.
But not theirs alone. Buried in this final reckoning is that fact that, in Osama bin Laden's war against the US, countless more Muslims paid with their lives than Americans, Britons, Australians or Spaniards did. Thousands of Iraqi Shias, Pakistanis, Yemenis and Jordanians also lost their lives as a result of an ideology that cast any Muslim who did not embrace the true path as a traitor – worse still, an apostate. The result of this fratricidal carnage is that al-Qaida has now lost what fatal attraction it once held for anti-imperialists. There is no more potent sign of the loss of al-Qaida's brand leadership of revolt than the Arab spring, in which one dictatorship after another has tottered and fallen, out of a yearning to end tyranny. The fight for democracy, not a caliphate, has begun to redeem decades of lost honour and dignity. No shockwave swept through the Arab world as news of Bin Laden's death spread, and that is perhaps the most fitting epitaph.
Lessons learned?
But what a litany of miscalculation and disaster the post-9/11 decade became. If Bin Laden and his fighters drew tight the tripwire for American military might, he was blessed with a president in George W Bush and a neoconservative group of advisers who marched straight into it. America was traumatised, but the eagerness of that administration to see al-Qaida as a foe that was more potent, widespread and numerically larger than it actually was turned what should always have been a series of planned counterterrorist operations into invasions, occupations and war seemingly without credible end. Easy to say in hindsight, less easy to enact at a moment where America was traumatised and searching for a means to hit back. Anti-terrorism gave way to its much more potent cousin, anti-insurgency. The fight against al-Qaida became a global game of hopscotch, jumping from one continent to another, creating such concepts as a crescent of crisis – a not too distinct echo of the domino theory. The war on terror will one day provide an object lesson in how not to react to an ideology whose whole purpose is to create a Manichean divide between Muslims and the western world. Any war which succeeded in lumping together as a common enemy populations as disparate as Sunnis in Iraq, southern Pashtuns in Afghanistan, Punjabi militants in Pakistan, Moroccans of the Maghreb and the Shabab of Somalia could only have ended in failure, and it surely is time to bury the war on terror. It posited whole areas of the globe whose governments were too weak to cope with the militants they harboured. It, too, was responsible for ending thousands of innocent lives.
Pakistan is the litmus test
The failed concept of the failed state is still being used to hunt militants in Yemen, widely assumed to have bought into the al-Qaida franchise. Here is a country where 7 million people, about one-third of the population, are deemed to be food insecure, and 10% malnourished. With a president who refuses to go, a 50% fall in export revenues, rising food prices (90% of all food has to be imported) and, if that were not enough, a water crisis, Yemen is at the centre of a perfect storm. And yet the dominant lens through which Washington views this particular failing state is counter-terrorism. USAid has spent millions of dollars in a stabilisation strategy for the central crescent of Yemen, deemed an al-Qaida hotbed, which is money down the drain. It is time we finally learned the lessons of this lost decade.
The biggest test of a new approach will be Pakistan. As the jubilation subsided in the US, fingers already started to be pointed towards Islamabad. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, said that the Pakistani army and intelligence services had many questions to answer. There are indeed many. Bin Laden was not only located in one of the most unlikely places for an international terrorist – the home of the Pakistan Military Academy, the country's version of Sandhurst. It's as if he'd been living in Camberley. He was in a purpose-built bunker and had been there for some time. The fact that a senior member of al-Qaida has been caught in a city far away from the drone strikes of North Waziristan is not new: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, others in Karachi and Faisalabad. But the suspicion that someone, somewhere in the ISI must have been sheltering Bin Laden was only amplified by a senior administration official who said yesterday that they shared their intelligence on their suspicions that Bin Laden was in this compound with no other country "including Pakistan".
There is, as yet, no evidence that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was playing a double game. And even if there were, what benefit to ending the war in Afghanistan would that intelligence produce? After 30,000 civilians and 5,000 soldiers and policemen have lost their lives in Pakistan's campaign against al-Qaida, there can be no doubt in any analyst's mind where the strategic interests of the Pakistani army lie. They lie in ending a war against militants which has become as much a threat to Pakistan as it has become to the territorial integrity of its neighbour Afghanistan. Pakistan's military may be a frustrating ally. It must also be appreciated in Washington that having America as your ally in Pakistan's part of the world is equally onerous. But the fact that the two share a common goal is indisputable, and even more so after Bin Laden's death. If America seriously wants to start high-level talks with the Taliban, it will be the ISI that will enable those to happen – not just for the Haqqani network but for Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura as well.
Obama's war
In the end, it all now comes down to one man, Barack Obama. On 11 September 2001 he was an obscure senator who reacted to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre by talking of the need to raise the hopes of embittered children across the globe. Almost a decade further on, the softest touch, in Dick Cheney's insulting view, has become the man who succeeded in hunting his quarry down. The irony will not be lost on Republicans who claim that America is now less safe under a Democrat president. There will undoubtedly be an al-Qaida response to their leader's death, and there is no shortage of evidence that plots are in the pipeline. A terrible life that brought misery to thousands is now over. Ending the legacy of that conflict will require all of Mr Obama's earliest and truest instincts. He now has the authority to carry them out.