Beyond Bin Laden (3 page)

In this new public discourse, Arabs asked embarrassing questions about their regimes—including about the relationships their rulers enjoyed with both the United States and Israel—and openly challenged the legitimacy of regimes that had been in power for decades and, in some cases, generations. Arabs had always transgressively joked about their rulers, of course, in private. Egyptians, for example, loved to tell a joke about the Angel of Death visiting Hosni Mubarak and telling him to bid goodbye to the people of Egypt. "Why," Mubarak asked, "where are they going?"
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By 2003, though, Arabs were finding ways to openly challenge their regimes while serious secular opposition groups began to stir in Cairo, providing the inspiration for if not the cadre of the popular movement that would eventually sweep Hosni Mubarak from power.
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When the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi committed suicide in the small town of Sidi Bouzid after being harassed to the point of despair by municipal officials, a spark was lit that burns to this day across the Arabic-speaking world. This fire has consumed not just the regimes in Tunis and Cairo but also the extremist vision of Osama bin Laden and his followers.

For as Khaled Saghieh observed, Osama bin Laden himself may have died at the hands of U.S. naval commandos, but Al Qaeda, the movement, died at the hands of the Arab popular uprisings.
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Osama bin Laden and his followers had struggled for years to topple the regimes in Cairo and the Gulf, but nonviolent protest movements—not armed insurrection—won the day. "What we noticed in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Yemen was the opposite of what Bin Laden stood for," the Saudi political analyst Jamal Khashoggi told the
Financial Times
. "The people want change but their vision is nonviolent and inclusive of all segments of society."
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A few months ago, I returned to Egypt to witness the revolution that had swept Hosni Mubarak from power after three decades and saw firsthand the pluralism on display that would have disgusted either Osama bin Laden or his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. There were posters in Tahrir Square demanding the release of the radical Islamist Omar Abdel-Rahman from a U.S. prison in North Carolina, but they were carried by few, as with other posters lionizing Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Most Egyptians carried their national flag as their banner. Christian and Muslim Egyptians, who had spent the days of the revolution pausing to shield each other as they prayed, continued to gather in the square alongside secular leftists and activists from the Muslim Brotherhood. Eventually, the competing visions of these various groups must be resolved through what are hoped to be democratic processes. But for now, they still exult in their shared victories.

Going forward, the challenges facing the Arabic-speaking world are as diverse as the region's peoples and states. Lisa Anderson, president of the American University of Cairo, has noted the important ways in which the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt vary and challenge the publics there differently.
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In Egypt, as Mona El-Ghobashy so eloquently put it, "The genius of the Egyptian revolution is its methodical restoration of the public weal. The uprising restored the meaning of politics, if by that term is understood the making of collective claims on government. It revalued the people, revealing them in all their complexity—neither heroes nor saints, but citizens."
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The challenge for Egypt, then, is to create accountable public institutions that represent the collective policy preferences of the Egyptian people and effectively administer and redistribute the resources of the state. No matter who is elected president, any Egyptian government that reflects the policy preferences of its people will almost certainly be a government more sympathetic to the stateless Palestinians than was the government of Hosni Mubarak, meaning rocky shoals for U.S.-Egyptian relations ahead. But as far as structural reform is concerned, for the most part, as in Tunisia, Egypt's challenge will be to reform existing institutions rather than to create new ones from whole cloth.

In Libya, by contrast, the challenge will not so much be one of reform but of state formation
ex nihilo
. Against the backdrop of a state whose old Ottoman bureaucracy the Italian colonizers did their best to dismantle and a Gaddafi regime whose pie-in-the-sky ambitions always meant that institutions meant to serve a Libyan state were never constructed, the task of building a Libyan state in the aftermath of both Gaddafi and a brutal civil war will be immense.
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Elsewhere, in Syria and in Yemen, for example, the final act of the play remains to be staged. And in any of these countries, of course, the political process going forward will involve Islamist parties and factions. But these Islamists are not likely to prove as extreme as Al Qaeda, and they will be resisted every step of the way by younger, secular activists as well as remnants of
l'ancien régime
. The rival visions of the heirs of Muhammad ‘Abduh will continue to compete for primacy. But as Jordanian Islamist Marwan Shehadeh notes, "extremist Islamist movements are on the retreat, giving way to the more moderate currents that have a more comprehensive vision and political platform," such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
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If extremists are on the wane, though, the death of Osama bin Laden comes at a time when the power of the United States in the region is also receding. Following the implosion of western Europe in two catastrophic world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, the United States had, along with the Soviet Union, replaced the United Kingdom and France as the dominant power in a region made all the more important thanks to the discovery of vast hydrocarbon reserves in the Arabian Peninsula. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War, the United States was briefly left supreme in the region. That hegemony, though, died in the fires of Iraq. Although the United States will leave enough military power in the region to guarantee access to the oil and gas passing through the Straits of Hormuz, a bankrupt United States exhausted by war is unlikely to project power as aggressively as it once did.

So for the first time in two centuries, the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world will be left to determine their future free from invading Western armies. Whatever path they chart, it will be their own.

 

Andrew Exum
is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. A native of Tennessee, he was educated in Philadelphia, Beirut, and London and served in the U.S. Army in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

This essay examines the implications of the Osama bin Laden raid in terms of the war in Afghanistan. Killing Bin Laden affirmed the power and determination of America, and his death offers an opportunity to greatly reduce the American effort in Afghanistan.

The successful raid on May 1, 2011, of Bin Laden's upscale compound in Pakistan dealt a severe blow to all Islamists. It was a clear victory for the CIA and the U.S. military. As a result, nations across the globe will be more willing to cooperate with American national security operatives. 

That Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight demonstrated the complicity of Pakistan's government. President Obama informed President Zardari of Pakistan
after
the raid, driving home the message that Pakistan could not be trusted. An embarrassed Islamabad scrambled to excuse its hypocrisy by claiming, "Osama bin Laden's death illustrates the resolve of the international community, including Pakistan, to fight and eliminate terrorism.… Pakistan will not allow its soil to be used in terrorist attacks against any country."

That claim, of course, was false. Pakistani officials have provided the sanctuary that has enabled both Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists to launch murderous attacks against other countries. The successful elimination of Osama bin Laden offers the chance to change the nature of the war in Afghanistan—if it signals a shift in attitude on the part of the Obama administration. Since 2001, American officials have tolerated the two-faced stance of Pakistan, even though its granting the enemy a sanctuary has enormously complicated the war in Afghanistan. Remove the sacredness of the sanctuary, and the balance of power between the Afghan security forces and the Taliban changes dramatically, permitting a major reduction in U.S. forces inside Afghanistan.

 

The strategy in Afghanistan has been muddled since 2001. The United States, aided by other NATO countries, invaded Afghanistan because Al Qaeda terrorists had murdered close to three thousand civilians in New York City. After the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Taliban—then governing most of Afghanistan—refused to turn over Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization residing inside Afghanistan. U.S. airpower swiftly destroyed the conventional units of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But then the military force, commanded by U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, permitted Bin Laden and a substantial cadre of Al Qaeda and Taliban members to escape into the wilds of western Pakistan. Neither General Franks nor President George W. Bush nor the U.S. Congress, nor indeed the American public, seriously entertained the idea of hot pursuit across the border. We did not finish the fight while the world still trembled before our wrath. When thousands of Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, our nation went to war. Had the Japanese claimed we could not pursue them, say, across the international date line, we would have laughed. Yet after Bin Laden killed thousands in 2001, our generals, politicians, and president stopped at the obscure Durand Line and allowed a sanctuary to Al Qaeda when the network was at its weakest.

Instead, the U.S., NATO, and the United Nations turned their collective attention to the gargantuan task of building Afghanistan into an economically viable, democratic, unified nation. In 2002, the U.S. changed its mission from counterterrorism into state-building.

The military embraced this mission. By 2006, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had produced a field manual on counterinsurgency that declared that soldiers and marines were "nation-builders as well as warriors."
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The manual was intended to provide a framework for winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its strength was its insistence that the people be treated with respect.

The doctrine was based upon a theory of the social contract—the United States would give the people money and protection, and honest Afghan officials and the people would turn against the insurgents—that did not address the dynamics of Afghanistan. The doctrine did not say what to do when the people remained neutral and the government remained dishonest. It was silent about Islamist religiosity as the ideology fueling the enemy, It laid out no practical steps for restraining corruption, and ignored tribalism and the existence of a sanctuary in Pakistan. It accorded total sovereignty to a host government in Kabul led by the erratic president Hamid Karzai. Put bluntly, the doctrine was theory that did not accord with the realities of Afghanistan.

From 2006 through 2008, even as Iraq was stabilizing, the Taliban were gaining strength and momentum in Afghanistan. Some claimed—rightly—that the United States needed 100,000 troops in the country, rather than 30,000. A report to Congress criticized a "lack of coherence" in disbursing $32 billion in U.S. and $25 billion in NATO European reconstruction funds, pointing to the need for a comprehensive strategy.
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The failures inside the Afghan government, however, were not fundamentally due to a lack of strategy or resources. In November 2009, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Eikenberry, who had served as the three-star commander in Afghanistan, warned against sending additional troops. He wrote, "Karzai was not an adequate strategic partner … shuns responsibility for any strategic burden, whether defense, governance, or development … there is no political ruling class that provides an overarching national identity."

The ambassador also held out little hope that Pakistan would cooperate. "Pakistan will remain the single greatest source of Afghan instability so long as the border sanctuaries remain, and Pakistan views its strategic interest as best served by a weak neighbor."
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In December 2009, President Obama announced, "It is in our vital national interest to send additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home."
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Asked what he expected the troops to accomplish, Obama replied that our goals were not clear and that a strategy was being devised.
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"We've seen a sense of drift in the mission in Afghanistan … what kinds of strategies and tactics we need to put in place," he said. "I don't think we've thought it through."
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In 2008, Obama had pledged "to wage the war that has to be won."
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A year later, Obama said the goal was "to deny it (the Taliban) the ability to overthrow the government." When asked if this was a change in mission, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied, "We are in this thing to win." Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added, "That's certainly where I am. . . . If we're not winning, we're losing. Having an intellectual debate about winning and losing … I don't think is very helpful.… I urge our troops to think carefully about how they will accomplish the mission they have been assigned."
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But the specifics of the mission were never clear. Some officials believed the strategy required fulsome nation-building. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for "a nationwide, civil-military campaign plan," including sending more American civilians to jump-start governmental services, plus stiff anti-corruption and anti-drug-trafficking measures. On the other hand, Gates suggested what sounded like nation-building lite. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there," he said, "we will lose."
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That seemed in line with the view of Britain's senior commander in Afghanistan: "We're not going to win this war," Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith said last October. "It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army."
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