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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri May 06 2011 - 03:21:39 EDT
May 5, 2011
SNAPSHOT
Was Bin Laden the Easy Part?
Facing Washington’s Many Dilemmas in the Middle East
Richard A. Falkenrath
*RICHARD A. FALKENRATH is Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Adjunct Senior
Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign
Relations. He is a former Deputy Commissioner of Counterterrorism at the New
York City Police Department and a former Deputy Homeland Security Adviser to
President George W. Bush.*
On Sunday, Osama bin Laden met a fitting if belated demise, shot by a U.S.
special forces team in an operation inside Pakistan. The killing of bin
Laden was a just and necessary act that should be met with somber
satisfaction but not exaltation. His death has global implications that are
both subtle and complex -- and perhaps will make life more complicated for
U.S. policymakers in combating the threat of global terror groups.
There is no reason to expect the Islamist terrorist threat to diminish as a
result of his death. Bin Laden had long since detached himself from direct
tactical control of global terrorist conspiracies conducted under the banner
of al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he established in the 1990s. He was
intimately involved in the planning and direction of al Qaeda’s 1998 attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack against
the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and, of course, the attacks of September 11, 2001.
But after the assault on his stronghold in Afghanistan and his flight into
Pakistan in late 2001, it became clear to him that his survival depended on
limiting his contact with the outside world to the barest minimum. Planning
and direction of al Qaeda’s post-9/11 plots, such as the bombing of the
London Underground in July 2005 and the 2006 plot against U.S.-bound flights
from<http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67831/richard-a-falkenrath/was-bin-laden-the-easy-part#>London,
were delegated to a succession of operational commanders, none of
whom survived very long. Bin Laden himself became known only as a
disembodied voice in an audiotape or a grainy image on the occasional video.
Even in this reduced role, however, bin Laden was a malignant, animating
spirit in dozens of smaller-scale terrorist plots and attacks -- and this is
a role he can play in death as well. Al Qaeda has metastasized into an
inchoate decentralized movement of Islamist terrorists and cells around the
world.
At the same time, the removal of bin Laden from the terrorism equation may
complicate U.S. global counterterrorism operations. Perceptions matter in
politics, at home and internationally. Many of the most important features
of an effective counterterrorism program -- recruitment of human agents,
unilateral use of deadly force with the risk of collateral damage, and the
apprehension, interrogation, and, sometimes, rendition of suspects -- are
distasteful, politically and legally risky, and unpopular.
The destruction on 9/11 and the ensuing wrath of the U.S. president and
people scared governments that had not previously cooperated with U.S.-led
counterterrorism efforts into doing so. The two-way flow of intelligence
between Washington and many different capitals increased dramatically. Much
of this intelligence related to individual suspected terrorists, some of
whom were then arrested or killed with the cooperation or at least the
acquiescence of their own governments. Although not unprecedented, this
degree of coordination between the United States and other countries --
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Malaysia, Kenya, to name only a few -- that previously
had a skeptical if not antagonistic view of U.S. foreign policy was
historically unusual. It is possible that bin Laden’s death will come to be
seen as the end of the golden years of counterterrorism, an aberrational
decade in global politics in which national governments cooperated as never
before to deal with a sub-state transnational threat.
Nowhere is this more true than in Pakistan, the country where bin Laden and
many of his al Qaeda followers hid after he escaped U.S. and British special
forces in Afghanistan. Although never as safe as Afghanistan under the
Taliban, Pakistan was for al Qaeda close to a safe haven -- until early
2008, when President George W. Bush, losing all patience and faith in the
Pakistani government’s willingness and ability to take on al Qaeda,
authorized an escalation of direct U.S. action against al Qaeda and other
extremists inside Pakistan. U.S. drone strikes rose from four in 2007 to 33
in 2008; this pace has only increased under Obama, from 53 in 2009 to 118 in
2010 (all data from the New America Foundation). Meanwhile, word of secret
U.S. commando raids into Pakistan from U.S. bases in Afghanistan began to
leak out.
Stepped-up U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan have not been popular
among Pakistan’s ruling elite or its people, particularly as U.S. drone
strikes began to target indigenous Pakistani extremist groups such as
Tehrik-i-Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although militants from these groups
provide shelter and training to some al Qaeda operatives, they have had
little if any operational ambition outside of South Asia. The Pakistani
government will likely take a few weeks to get over its embarrassment about
bin Laden’s long-standing presence just outside Islamabad, but once it does
there is little doubt that it will resume and perhaps even intensify its
demands that the United States recede from encroachments against Pakistani
sovereignty.
Washington, for its part, will find it difficult to ignore these calls as it
weighs other vital U.S. interests in Pakistan, such as the security of the
Pakistani nuclear weapons arsenal, the ability to resupply U.S. forces in
Afghanistan from Pakistani seaports, and the stability of Indo-Pakistani
relations.
The death of bin Laden will affect the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, as well.
This nearly decade-long war began to rout al Qaeda, an objective that
enjoyed wide and deep political support. But now the American people are
fatigued by it. The only war aim agreed to by virtually the entire U.S.
political class is preventing the reemergence of Afghanistan as a safe haven
for international terrorists. With bin Laden gone, Obama may lose even this
last remaining source of public support for the war in Afghanistan.
Above all, bin Laden’s death was the death of a symbol -- in this case, a
symbol with several different meanings for several different communities.
The defiant survival of bin Laden in his Pakistani redoubt did not just
inspire would-be jihadis around the world but also permitted a temporary
simplification of U.S. national security strategy: an unwavering
concentration on the protection of the American homeland from another
devastating terrorist attack hatched abroad. As Bush put it in late 2001,
"Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held
accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or against us in the fight
against terror." Although he gave up the blunt rhetoric, Obama essentially
continued the counterterrorism policies of the Bush White House. As such, he
increased the barrage of drone strikes against Pakistan’s tribal north;
added, for the first time ever, a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, to a
top-secret list of people who may be targeted and killed by U.S. military
forces; and kept counterterrorism at the center of U.S. relations with a
range of “front-line” states from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Only the
sustained animus in Washington and around the United States toward the
perpetrators of 9/11 permitted such a strong and unwavering focus in U.S.
national security policy.
Bin Laden’s death thus leaves the United States at a conceptual turning
point away from the strategic clarity of the post-9/11 era. Defeating al
Qaeda and protecting the homeland will become not just an ever more
hackneyed refrain but an increasingly peripheral issue for U.S.
policymakers.
The present Middle East, for instance, is seized by forces far more powerful
than al Qaeda ever was, and presents policy challenges to the United States
far more complex than terrorism alone ever had. The threat of Islamist
extremism is only one of many risks -- and by no means the greatest --
associated with the political upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain,
Syria, and Yemen.
These events present genuinely deep, largely insolvable dilemmas to Obama
and his officials: whether, when, and how to withdraw support from a
long-standing, autocratic ally facing democratic protests? How to explain a
values-based policy toward one Arab country while pursuing an
interests-based policy toward another, more important Arab country? When and
how to use the military power of a fractious coalition to protect a band of
rebels from a wrathful, erratic dictator? How to support internal democratic
reform in countries with no democratic political tradition and where
political Islam is the most legitimate, cohesive alternative to the corrupt
anciens régimes? The Obama administration will have to come up with answers
to all these questions while still wrestling with Guantánamo and other
problematic legacies of the war on terror amid a divisive and sometimes
gridlocked domestic politics and a fragile, nearly jobless economic recovery
and under the extreme fiscal pressures of public-sector debt.
Against this tremendously difficult national agenda, the killing of bin
Laden was the rarest of events in modern-day American politics: something
everyone could agree on and feel good about. Over time, the sending of a
special forces assault team into bin Laden’s compound in suburban Islamabad
may well come to be seen as one of the easiest decisions Obama had to make
in his first term.
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