Early on Sunday evening I was discussing the threat global terrorism poses to the U.S. with a friend and sometime colleague. We were wondering whether the lack of any major terrorist attack against the United States since September 11, 2001, is evidence that the American government is managing the threat of terrorism, or whether it shows that terrorism is not actually the threat it is so often made out to be. Which was a stronger factor in al-Qaeda and its sympathizers' inability to mount a significant attack against the United States -- was it competence on the part of security officials, or incompetence on the part of terrorist networks?
Shortly after this conversation I opened my computer to find rumors across major news sites that Osama bin Laden was dead. We both watched as the President announced that bin Laden had been killed on Sunday by American soldiers, the result of a covert manhunt that had been re-invigorated since he took office in 2009. Whatever you believe (know?) about the capabilities of al-Qaeda and similar groups, this is a point for the "threat management" column.
Ultimately this will mean a great deal more for American domestic politics and relations with Pakistan than it will for the Arab world. However, the killing of bin Laden is a symbolic victory for the United States and it will have an impact on its image, if not an immediate effect on American policies or the defense of American interests in the Middle East. In fact, bin Laden's fate is more revealing of the past than it is of the future. While I do not believe his death will greatly effect events in the Arab world, bin Laden's story in some ways signifies several key failures in American policy toward the Middle East over the past generations.
Osama bin Laden was the founder of al-Qaeda, a violent extremist group that called for the killing of Americans, Jews, and any other collaborators with the so-called "Zionist-Crusader alliance," including Muslims. Al-Qaeda was never a mainstream political movement -- bin Laden and his followers eschewed politics to play the role of a quasi-Leninist vanguard, which aimed to create a radically different society through terrorism. Al-Qaeda was never a major part of the Middle Eastern or Arab political landscape. It never enjoyed broad-based support or acceptance, and it never had any true political influence in the Middle East (though it was a significant player in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, where it had no need of popular support anyway).
Though bin Laden achieved his greatest notoriety for the attacks of September 11, 2001, in many ways that event was his ultimate failure. Terrorists anywhere are too weak to defeat their enemies through overwhelming force. Instead they must strike hard enough to provoke a disproportionate response, thereby causing their enemy to waste blood and treasure and cause enough collateral damage as to turn larger, mainstream forces against it. The attacks of September 11 were meant to draw the United States to retaliate indiscriminately and thus turn the entire Muslim world against them, in a global revolution that, it was hoped, would alter the entire international system. In a sense the strategy had its desired effect, provoking a heavy-handed and widely unpopular response from the United States in the form of invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a global campaign against Islamic extremists that resulted in shameful abuses of human rights at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.
However, in the end bin Laden's strategy failed. While many Muslims -- and many Arabs -- consider the United States their enemy, they have no great sympathy for Osama bin Laden, and they have not been inspired in any significant numbers to attack the United States, even though they loathe American policy toward their countries. Al-Qaeda remains a marginal movement which commands no real authority and has little appeal among the general public of the Arab world, or the Muslim world at large. Viewed in a broader context, the September 11 attacks were a desperate measure, a last-ditch attempt to revive Islamic extremism, which had reached the height of its influence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 2001 bin Laden and his ilk had been recognized as the atavistic murderers they are, offering a vision of the world that could not possibly be acceptable to the vast majority of Muslims. While their message of resistance to oppressive governments and their patron superpower resonated across the Arab world, its ideology and methods were too extreme to command significant popular sympathy there.
Ultimately, bin Laden was a sideshow to a wider problem of Middle Eastern politics. While he was certainly dangerous, much of his influence was the product of a milieu in the Arab world that had created widespread desperation, radicalization, and hatred toward the United States. The root of this problem was not, as bin Laden argued, irreconcilable conflict between Islam and the West. It was actually the loss of popular legitimacy of Arab governments, repression of popular dissent and peaceful means of opposition, and the complicity of the United States in the resultant poisoning of Arab societies.
Osama bin Laden is dead today, but the system of autocracies that enabled his rise to infamy largely remains. Fortunately, at no point in history has this system ever been in as much danger of disintegration as it is now. Across the Middle East people are calling for an end to the old order, not through martyrdom and extremism as al-Qaeda would have it, but through peaceful protest and democracy. The Middle East is on the brink of a historic transformation, and although tremendous challenges remain there are many reasons to believe in a brighter future. Yet as much cause as there may be for hope, the stakes are extremely high, for Arab societies and the United States alike. It is incumbent upon the United States to facilitate transition in the Arab world to more stable governments that base their legitimacy in popular sovereignty. Failure to do so may ultimately unleash forces that are just as dangerous or worse than Osama bin Laden, and far harder to kill.
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