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Now for the price of chasing Afghan shadows
By David Pilling
Published: May 4 2011 22:52 | Last updated: May 4 2011 22:52
There is something strange about an assassination without a corpse. As with Eva Peron, the first lady of Argentina whose body mysteriously vanished for 16 years, the absence of a cadaver is unsettling. Save for Barack Obama’s word, there is little concrete evidence that Osama bin Laden is actually dead. Before long, the US president will be obliged to produce the photos – inflammatory or not – of the slain al-Qaeda leader.
Of course, few can seriously doubt that bin Laden has been killed, nor that the world is better for it. Few can deny either the psychological boost to America of bringing its most hated adversary to bloody account. But the danger is that the outcomes of the deed will prove as hollow as an assassination without a corpse. Mr Obama’s victory may turn out to be Pyrrhic.
This is partly because the world has moved on since the time when bin Laden was judged the world’s most dangerous man. By all accounts, for the past five years he has been holed up in the leafy environs of Abbottabad, without phone or e-mail. Rather than an organiser of terror, he has become an idea of terror. His cancerous thought has metastasised throughout Pakistan, to Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. An idea, naturally, is harder to kill than a person.
Much of the Arab world has moved on too. The rebellion across north Africa and the Middle East has little to do with bin Laden’s Manichean vision of an Islamic state. Protesters from Egypt to Libya have drunk the intoxicating ideas of western democracy.
Killing bin Laden, then, has brought home the fact of his diminished force. More damaging still, it has exposed the deep flaws in America’s shadow-chasing campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The month after the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan. The reason was straightforward. Afghanistan’s Taliban government was harbouring bin Laden and refusing to give him up. For many Americans, al-Qaeda and the Taliban have fused into one. But the Afghan Taliban’s goals have always been more modest than those of al-Qaeda. The Taliban wants to rid Afghanistan of foreigners and run the country itself. When the US invasion force toppled the Taliban and sent most of al-Qaeda’s warriors fleeing into Pakistan, it was left fighting a different Afghan mission – nation building.
The discovery of bin Laden in Pakistan exposes US mission creep in a blinding flash. With the al-Qaeda leader dead and the July deadline for the start of troop drawdown approaching, it has become easier for domestic critics of the Afghan war to urge a complete withdrawal. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat, told CNN this week that the US “can’t use physical force to reform every bad government”. Nor he added, referring to the futility of chasing terrorists from safe haven to safe haven, could it “plug every rat hole in the world”.
The killing of bin Laden sheds an even worse light on Washington’s alliance with Islamabad. Whatever Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was up to, it does not look good. Either it failed to spot the world’s most wanted man right under its nose – and with $18bn in American aid, you’d have thought it could have afforded a ladder to peek over bin Laden’s wall. Alternatively, it has been deliberately shielding him from discovery. Leon Panetta, CIA director, said the Pakistanis were not informed of Sunday’s mission because they might have tipped bin Laden off. It is hard to imagine a more damning verdict.
In a blistering editorial, Brahma Chellaney, an Indian defence expert and no friend of Pakistan, wrote: “The scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs.” His views might be dismissed as those of an Indian enemy were they not so closely echoed by Pakistan’s American friends. Several US Congressmen have demanded that Washington cease all aid to Islamabad. “Before we send another dime, we need to know whether Pakistan truly stands with us in the fight against terrorism,” said Frank Lautenberg, a Democratic senator from New Jersey.
Yet Washington cannot abandon Pakistan. Mr Obama showed that by praising Islamabad for its co-operation in hunting down bin Laden, in spite of evidence that its role was, at best, minimal. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is too volatile and too much a breeding ground of militancy for the US simply to ditch it. The US and Pakistan are stuck together in their uncomfortable bed.
The third point exposed by bin Laden’s death is just how much it has cost to run him to ground. US television networks have put the figure, including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at above $2,000bn. That is the essence of the “imperial overstretch” Paul Kennedy, a Yale historian, describes in his The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. He writes of the Habsburg monarchs: “They steadily over-extended themselves in the course of repeated conflicts and became militarily top-heavy for their weakening economic base.”
While the US has been chasing bin Laden all over the Middle East and running up unsustainable deficits, China has pursued its juggernaut rise. Last year, it became the world’s second-largest economy and replaced the US as the biggest manufacturer. Washington has got its man. But it may have lost its way.
david.pilling@ft.com
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