The U.S. will react like a wounded bear and it will attack Afghanistan.
These were the first words of President Pervez Musharraf at the meeting of top Pakistani military and government officials following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The leaders determined that their best policy would be to absorb the initial unyielding blows of the U.S. reaction with acquiescence before beginning to push back. Abdul Sattar, a foreign minister who attended that meeting, summed up the policy Pakistan would follow for the next few years with the phrase, "First say yes and later say but...."
It is unlikely these Pakistan elite imagined the U.S. would also invade Iraq. Last September, Ted Koppel wrote Nine years after 9/11, let's stop playing into bin Laden's hands
The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.
It is at least as foolish to base foreign policy on personalities as it is to view domestic politics through the same lens. What al Qaeda did on 9/11 was a criminal conspiracy. The U.S. and the world have a very effective apparatus for dealing with such conspiracies. They do not involve invading countries, destroying their infrastructures, creating millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.
By 2004, Osama bin Laden was positively gloating at the great success of his terrorism:
All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.
Koppel ends his piece:
Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.
While most Americans celebrate the death of this man, is it too much to ask that a few of us consider how eagerly we assisted him in achieving his goals? Most dedicated people I know are willing to lose their lives for the values they cherish. Bin Laden cherished Islam* and devoted himself to expelling foreigners from Islam's holiest lands. My guess is that he died certain that he had gone a long way toward achieving his goal of weakening the United States. It would have been much more satisfying to have captured him through the more appropriate means of police action, to have treated him like the common criminal he is than to have created him into a martyr.
*[Update: JustJennifer reminds me in the comments that bin Laden held a fundamentalist view of Islam that the majority of Muslims consider to be a perversion.]
I hope in the next few days, a student of the field will compare the strength of al Qaeda in 2001 to their strength today. I know enough to know that clumsy U.S. actions have been a marketing dream for their particular terrorist brand. Photos of monstrous U.S. behavior at abu ghraib, photos of U.S. soldiers grinning over the bodies of murdered Afghan farmers, photos from lawless Guantanamo. Millions of people who once saw the U.S. as a beacon of democracy, as a nation of laws, now see us as a highly corrupt country owned and run by imperialists.
Let's take a look at just one region. We've been expelled from Uzbekistan and have lost favor in most of Central Asia, a region positively disposed toward U.S. influence before they experienced our double dealing firsthand. Through our ill-considered actions in that area, we have ceded influence to China, Russia, and Pakistan.
Since 9/11 the IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan] and other Islamic extremist groups, some of them linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban but others quite independent, have developed a strong underground base inside Uzbekistan. Since 9/11 hundreds of young Uzbek militants have traveled to Waziristan for training and have fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. The IMU leader Tahir Yuldashev remains in Waziristan and has reestablished links with Uzbekistan. After 9/11 no more than five hundred to six hundred Uzbeks were taking refuge in Pakistan's tribal areas. By 2008 that number had grown to between three and four thousand Uzbek and Central Asian militants in the tribal areas under IMU command, indicating that new recruits were constantly arriving for training. Moreover, new splinter groups such as the Islamic Jihad Union, which worked directly under al Qaeda, had also appeared. In September 2007, German authorities arrested three German Muslims who had trained with the Islamic Jihad Union and al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas and had returned to Germany to try to bomb the U.S. air force base at Ramstein, from which U.S. troops are flown to Iraq and Afghanistan. Another half a dozen extremists who had also trained with the Union were still being sought by the authorities.
U.S. policy toward Uzbekistan and Central Asia was one-directional, ham-fisted, and without an ounce of nuance. The Bush administration had claimed to be advancing human rights and democracy in Central Asia even as the CIA was becoming dependent on Uzbekistan's security services for handling rendered prisoners and the Pentagon directed 80 percent of U.S. aid to the Uzbek military rather than to economic development.... the Bush administration treated the country as a mere dumping ground for rendered prisoners and a logistics base for Afghanistan. Uzbekistan and its people--their hopes and aspirations--did not exist for anyone in Washington.
After the United States was evicted, nobody in Washington got up to ask, "Who lost Uzbekistan?"...
... The Bush administration's lack of a strategy ensured that the regimes won and that public sympathy turned against the United States as Washington failed to support democracy or economic reforms. The United States lost a major opportunity to influence Central Asia for decades to come while gaining greater access to its energy resources. In 2001 the United States held a pivotal position in Central Asia, but five years later it was forced to yield that position to Russia and China. Ultimately President Bush was responsible for losing Uzbekistan and Central Asia, as the U.S. administration pursued one-track policies that put torturing prisoners above the need fro nation building.
Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, pp. 347 - 348
For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul.
I am seeing reports that bin Laden's death was made possible by intelligence gathered from Guantanamo detainees. I am sure plenty of people will take this as justification for criminal behavior of the U.S. government there. It is not. There is no question that bin Laden could have been captured, probably sooner, using standard criminal procedures for fighting criminal conspiracies. And it is almost certain, on the basis of what is known about interrogation, that the same information would have been gathered more readily without the use of torture. And even if none of these things were so, torture is fundamentally wrong morally and politically. Torture goes hand in hand with tyranny. Wars of aggression go hand in hand with tyranny. I repeat, it is foolish to base foreign policy decisions on wanting to capture and kill one person.
And now we can resign ourselves to an endless cycle of terrorism and reprisal, or we can look for another way. We can recognize the mistake of responding to a criminal conspiracy with wars of aggression, creating thousands of enemies while eliminating one.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said Monday that Osama bin Laden's killing 'will stem terrorism and eliminates one of the causes of violence in the world.'
In a brief statement online, the group, which renounced violence decades ago, added that following news of the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the United States should leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
source
It is never too late to align ourselves with democratic movements. Al Qaeda is an authoritarian, theocratic movement that embraces violence. Most people around the world, Muslim or otherwise, want freedom not violence. The death of bin Laden offers an opportunity for the U.S. to act with sensitivity and nuance. This is our opportunity to reverse course, for our own sake and for the sake of the world. We can think only of terrorist retaliation for the death of bin Laden, or we can honestly support the non-terrorist movements that are sweeping the region.
I am not delusional. I believe the U.S. government is actually driven by other motives than the capture of one person, Machiavellian motives which the average American would find reprehensible. I view the capture of bin Laden as a mass consumption event for the purpose of justifying in the eyes of voters continued massive expenditures on imperialism and continuing drift from our Enlightenment values. Still, for my own sanity, I have to say that "It doesn't have to continue this way."