Hersh on the end of Bin Laden

Seymour Hersh has a new investigative report out disputing the official "Zero Dark Thirty" version of Osama bin Laden's death: The Killing of Osama bin Laden.

Hersh's account, based largely on anonymous sources, challenges the official and popular account(s) in various ways, claiming:

• Pakistani officials knew that Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and were effectively holding him prisoner there.
• Bin Laden was not playing any significant role in directing what was left of his Al Qaeda organization.
• Assassinating Bin Laden rather than capturing him was always the aim of the mission.
• The Pakistani government knew of the American raid in advance, approved of it and directly facilitated it.
• The story that the Navy buried Bin Laden at sea is a dubious one at best; his body may have been shot to pieces by the Navy SEAL team.
• Bin Laden did not pull a gun on his attackers.
• There was no firefight at the Abbottabad compound.
• The claim that the SEALS carried away large numbers of valuable documents both hardcopy and paper from the compound are false.

I don't take Seymour Hersh's reporting to be gospel. His book about John Kennedy's administration, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), showed a surprising credulous attitude toward even some of the dubious tales about JFK's love life. Gary Wills opened his pungent review of the book by commenting, "I am ready to believe nine bad things about John Kennedy before breakfast—until Mr. Hersh adds a tenth, and that makes me begin wondering about the first nine." (A Second Assassination New York Review of Books 12/18/1997 issue)

But he's one of the most accomplished journalists out there and he has excellent sources on military and intelligence matters. So I pay attention to what he does report. And Hersh does have a good record in his War on Terror reporting.

The official Zero Dark Thirty version has been tattered for a while.

I never believed that Pakistan had no advance knowledge of the raid. And it makes sense that someone in the Pakistani ISI or military knew that OBL was staying there. Hersh's account is more plausible on those points, however much is eventually documented or not in the inevitable document leaks of the future. It's also easy to understand that for "reasons of state" both Pakistan and the US would need to deny the cooperation.

And there are several reasons the Obama Administration would need to push back on the notion that the goal was always to deliberately assassinate Osama rather than attempt to bring him before American justice in court.

The squabbling over who decided what to say in the aftermath of the raid and who should review it, etc., are a lot fuzzier. Bob Gates, for instance, who is cited in the piece, isn't exactly known for relentlessly telling the unvarnished truth. But patterns of obfuscation can also us tell a lot. And for researchers like Marcy Wheeler who follow domestic espionage issues, they can be important clues for future areas of research.

Cenk Uygur reports on the story here, Critics Attack Seymour Hersh After Bin Laden Raid Story Goes Public The Young Turks 05/12/2015:

Here are some of the additional stories that have come out in response to Hersh's article.

Jon Schwarz and Ryan Deereaux at Glenn Greenwald's First Look/Intercept shop, Author Reported Essentials of Hersh's Bin Laden Story in 2011 - With Seemingly Different Sources 05/11/2015. The reports to which the title refers are by political scientist R J Hillhouse posted on her blog, The Spy Who Billed Me, about Bin Laden Turned in by Informant -- Courier Was Cover Story 08/07/2011 and Questions Raised by Real Story of How US Found Bin Laden 08/11/2015.

Hillhouse did her first post at that blog since 2011 on 05/11/2015 after Hersh's story came out, Hersh Did Not Break Bin Laden Cover Up Story:

On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:

• The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction
• OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.
• The Pakistani Intelligence Service -- ISI -- was sheltering bin Laden
• Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive
• The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden
• Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL
• Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid
• The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials
• The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed

At the time, American media largely ignored the story which was picked up around the world, from London and Sydney, to Istanbul and Islamabad.

The Hersh story makes all of the points described in my 2011 pieces. The Spy Who Billed Me redux.

Digby, Bob Baer muses about Hersh Hullabaloo 05/12/2015

Liberal war-on-terror hawk Peter Bergen challenges Hersh's report in Was there a cover-up in bin Laden killing? CNN 05/11/2015.

Another highly critical piece against Hersh is The many problems with Seymour Hersh's Osama bin Laden conspiracy theory Vox 05/11/2015.

Charlie Pierce, The Bin Laden Raid: The Man Is Still Dead Esquire Politics Blog 05/11/2015. Pierce link to the articles in the two preceding links here and notes:

The strength of Hersh's report comes late in the piece, when he gets fairly deep in the weeds about how the CIA's story of its role in the mission has morphed over the years, and in putting what he alleges is the administration's deceit in the context of the "war" on terror, to which deceit has been fundamental since it was launched.

However, to me, anyway, Bergen seems to do better debunking Hersh's claims than Hersh does defending them. The idea that Saudi Arabia was footing the bills for bin Laden's exile seems less than plausible. I also don't think the president needed an imaginary military pageant surrounding the events to get re-elected, as one of Hersh's sources argues. I think the country would have taken "bin Laden Dead" as something of a foreign policy triumph no matter what the actual circumstances of his demise.

What's clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we've been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe. [my emphasis]

That bolded part about Saudi Arabia is eye-raising. But who knows? As Bob Baer suggests in the interview linked in Digby's piece above reminds us, Bin Laden may have been able to provide details about the 9/11 attacks that would be very embarrassing to both the Saudi monarchy and the Cheney-Bush Administration.

Peter Grier at the Christian Science Monitor expresses a skeptical take on Hersh's version in The geopolitics of Seymour Hersh's Osama bin Laden story 05/11/2015:

The greatest weakness of Hersh’s piece may be the sheer scale of the deception that would have been necessary for the US to promote a false story of the raid. That’s the problem with many conspiracy theories: They’re just too hard to carry out. Dozens of US officials would have had to mislead the public for years. Pakistan, too, would have had to keep the secret – until now.

And for what? Quartz writer Bobby Ghosh says that while Hersh’s piece may be sensational it never answers the one question that underlies all conspiracy theories: Why?

“Why would the Pakistanis ... and the Obama administration have played such an elaborate ruse on the world?”

Tagging this as a "conspiracy theory" is an ad hominem way to try to dismiss the report. But Hersh's report doesn't strike me as inherently implausible. The Taliban was Pakistan's ally and Bin Laden's was the Taliban's ally. Pakistan wants to keep Afghanistan as a "strategic depth" resource against India and they regard the current Afghan government as pro-India. So it's not at all strange that they might want to keep a resource like Bin Laden in their reserve. Hersh's own explanation that Pakistan wanted to use him as a bargaining chip with the US.

Also, the CIA and the military run high-security, secret operations all the time and all over the world. It doesn't strike me that the level of concealment he describes is inherently unbelievable.

War on terror, or a Long War war running on fear?

The Washington Post's David Ignatius, one of the Very Serious People in good standing, recently wrote about How Osama bin Laden is winning, even in death 04/27/2012:

In the year since Osama bin Laden’s death, it has been a comforting thought for Westerners to say that he failed. And that’s certainly true in terms of al-Qaeda, whose scorched-earth jihad tactics alienated Muslims along with everyone else. But in terms of bin Laden’s broader goal of moving the Islamic world away from Western influence, he has done better than we might like to think.

Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved. ...

And the battle is still raging in Yemen, the place that bin Laden believed offered his best chance of victory. The United States just decided to step up its drone war there, which is a sure sign that al-Qaeda poses a significant, continuing threat. [my emphasis]

Marcy Wheeler in We Drone Strike, Ergo We Are at War Emptywheel 04/28/2012 sums up Ignatius' analytical logic: "David Ignatius, DC insider, says we’re ramping up drone strikes, ergo al Qaeda must pose a significant, continuing threat." Courtier journalism at its "best", in other words.

Inatius and Brian Fishman of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and the Obama-friendly New America Foundation joined Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour on Monday to talk about the same topic, A Year After Bin Laden's Death, How Strong Is al-Qaida? 04/30/2012:



This idea that Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaida is devastated but Al Qaida still represents a terrible and growing global threat to the United States is so bizarre and delusional that it's advocates have a hard time even pretending to believe it. In a column devoted to the notion that anything that happens in Muslim-majorities countries that even slightly irritates the US is a terrorist threat from Bin Laden's Ghost, Ignatius the Very Serious Person also writes:

As I reported last month, bin Laden was so worried that killing Muslims had tainted al-Qaeda’s image that he proposed rebranding the group with a different name. What bothered bin Laden, he wrote, was that "al-Qaeda describes a military base with fighters without a broader mission to unify the nation."

Al-Qaeda couldn’t make the transition from violent jihad to nonviolent Islamist politics. That wasn’t its DNA. Bin Laden continued to plan suicide operations against America and its political leaders, and he beseeched Atiyah to find “a brother distinguished by his good manners, integrity, courage and secretiveness, who can operate in the U.S.” Basically, he wanted to keep killing Americans but stop killing Muslims.

This theme of internal reform, which would halt the Muslim bloodshed, is clear in a December 2010 admonition from Atiyah and another deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, to the Pakistani Taliban movement known as the TTP: "We stress on the fact that real reform is the duty of all, and to succeed we should look for and correct our actions and avoid these grave mistakes."

According to that, Bin Laden himself, leader of the Al Qaida group that carried out the 9/11 attacks, was so disgusted with the groups that now call themselves "Al Qaida" that before his death a year ago he wanted to distance himself from the name "Al Qaida" because he thought they were ruining his brand. But those same groups and every other Muslim political groups that somehow bothers Washington is a continuation of the Bin Laden/Al Qaida threat.
And it doesn't make jack for sense.

That doesn't prevent him from expanding on that spin in the Newshour interview:

So, from our standpoint, the best thing that happened is that this violent terrorist means of jihad, means of striking against foreign influence in the Muslim world has been discredited.

What you see is still strong is the idea that bin Laden and so many other Muslims have that Western influence is too pervasive. They want it out. And so we have seen in these Arab uprisings over the last year a continuing force for that idea, which was an idea that bin Laden had too.

Making this argument also means ignoring real history, a practice in which our Very Serious People are experienced. Bin Laden may have been all kinds of evil. But the reason he and his fanatical followers originally focused on the US as the "far enemy" that had to be their priority target was that after the Gulf War, American troops remained stationed in Saudi Arabia. And the US carried imposed a major sanctions regime on Iraq for over a decade, with more or less continual bombing, including the very intensive bombing of Operation Desert Fox - surely one of the strangest operational names the Pentagon ever came up with because of its association with Ernst Rommel - in late 1998. All that in addition to the fact that they saw the US as a prime supporter of unpopular and dictatorial regimes like Mubarak's in Egypt. Even if one defends every single one of those actions as necessary and desirable, it makes no sense to ignore that they also included undesirable repercussions. Like Bin Laden's and Al Qaida's view of their jihadist mission.

So maybe it's time for a serious, practical reassessment of the amount of intervention the US is carrying out, especially the drone strikes which may look "surgical" and clean to Americans, but look like war to the people in the village where the bombs explode.

I'll have to give Judy Woodruff credit, here, though. She does press the point in a polite way that Ignatius' argument really doesn't make sense. After getting him to agree that a party like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that is using a parliamentary path to power doesn't represent the same kind of threat Bin Laden's Al Qaida did, we get this exchange:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that how you would see it, Brian Fishman, that it's there, but it's not the direct threat to the U.S. that al-Qaida has been?

BRIAN FISHMAN: Yes.

I think, in many ways, the Arab spring revolutions, especially their -- in Egypt, where it was a relatively peaceful revolution, was a clear repudiation of al-Qaida's ideology and strategy for changing the political dynamics in the Middle East.

But I think it's also important to note that while there is sort of a shared intellectual lineage between the Muslim Brotherhood and groups like al-Qaida, today, al-Qaida looks at groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as its foremost enemy, even more so than the United States, because it sees groups like that as competing for the same constituencies that it wants to lead.

And al-Qaida knows that it's not going to lose a lot of supporters to the United States directly, but it will lose supporters to the Muslim Brotherhood if groups like that are able to demonstrate that they can seize political power, and really influence the way that governance is structured in that part of the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And does -- and, David, in a final few seconds, what posture then does the United States have in that struggle between al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, we're going to keep going after -- the U.S. will keep going after al-Qaida wherever it finds people who are dedicated to the -- violent change and killing of Americans.

Which brings us back to Marcy's characterization of Ignatius' argument: "David Ignatius, DC insider, says we’re ramping up drone strikes, ergo al Qaeda must pose a significant, continuing threat."

For the Very Serious People, the existence of the Long War Against Terrorism creates its own justification.

Tags: global war on terror, long war, osama bin laden, war on terror

Al Qaida a bigger threat than ever? Say what?!?

Actually, President Obama is saying something different. "'Not only were we able to drive al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but slowly and systematically we have been able to decimate the ranks of al Qaeda, and a year ago we were able to finally to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,' Obama said to cheers." (Caren Bohan, Obama swoops into Afghanistan on bin Laden death anniversary Reuters 05/01/2012) He was visiting Afghanistan. Bohan's report continues:

But even as he asserted in his speech that there was a "clear path" to fulfilling the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and made his strongest claim yet that the defeat of al Qaeda was "within reach," he warned of further hardship ahead.

"I recognize that many Americans are tired of war ... But we must finish the job we started in Afghanistan and end this war responsibly," he said at Bagram airbase outside of Kabul, where only months ago thousands of Afghans rioted after U.S. troops accidentally burned copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Matthew Schofield Of McClatchy Newspapers presents a less optimistic picture in After Osama bin Laden, al Qaida still a many-headed threat 04/26/2012. After McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder, it continued the high-quality foreign affairs reporting that Knight-Ridder had established on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. But this one makes me worry that the quality may be slipping.

It's generally accepted among Americans, it seems, that the death of the super-duper master terrorist Osama Bin Laden was such a great event that we killed Osama bin Laden that it was a good thing for people to be dancing in the streets and whooping and hollering and gittin' drunk in celebration afterwards. But if Schofield's report is correct, "There is a growing fear, however, that Osama bin Laden’s death didn’t even seriously wound the international terror threat."

That growing fear in Schofield's report comes from named and unnamed terrorism experts. But the legitimate concerns in his report are hard to separate from threat inflation in the expressed opinions of people who have developed a stake in the fight against terrorism that they aren't ready to relinquish.

Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that this many-headed beast is expected to strike more and more frequently in coming years, and he cited the difficulty of identifying “lone wolf” terrorists — small groups or individuals who self-radicalize.

"It's not easy," he told a Canadian Senate committee this week. "These individuals seem to be a mix of terrorists and people who simply have very big personal problems."

An unexpected example emerged in a Norwegian courtroom last week: Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-immigration nationalist on trial for the murders of 77 people, admitted that he closely studied al Qaida’s methods. He called the group "the most successful revolutionary movement in the world."

This passage reminded me of a scene in George Axelrod's comic play The Seven Year Itch, which provided one of Marilyn Monroe's most spectacular screen roles. In the play, the protagonist Richard Sherman, feeling an exaggerated guilt over a clumsy pass he made at an attractive neighbor the previous night, has persuaded a reluctant psychiatrist visiting in his office to give him a few minutes of a free consultation:

RICHARD I'm desperate, Doctor. Last night after you left, I was just sitting there listening to the ball game ...

DR. BRUBAKER (Outmaneuvered, but still game) This fact in itself is not really sufficient cause to undertake analysis ...

RICHARD No, I don't mean that. I started out listening to the ball game and do you know what I ended up doing?

DR. BRUBAKER I have no idea ...

RICHARD In ended up attempting to commit what I guess they call criminal assault ...

DR. BRUBAKER (Defeated, he takes a pad and pencil from his pocket) From the way you phrase it, I assume the attempt was unsuccessful. ...

RICHARD Thank God! All I did was knock us both off the piano bench. ...

DR. BRUBAKER (A flicker of interest - he begins to write) You attempted to commit criminal assault on a piano bench?

That scene came to mind because that passage of Schofield's report, like Richard Sherman's confession, starts off sounding dire but offers specifics that don't seem to begin to match the buildup.

We're supposed to worry about the increasing influence of the Salafist extremist Muslim group Al Qaida and its dead former leader Bin Laden ... because of Anders Behring Breivik? The anti-Muslim fanatic who shot up a bunch of kids at a social democratic party's youth camp because the thought their Party was too friendly to Muslim immigrants? Does that make jack for sense?

Osama bin Laden's Al Qaida organization of 2001 was a network of terrorists under Bin Laden's general operational control. Bin Laden is dead. The group that was "Al Qaida" in 2001 is essentially non-existent now. The President just said that "we have been able to decimate the ranks of al Qaeda." And in the paragraph that following the one about Breivik, Schofield is reporting the same thing:

Anti-terror experts see the al Qaida influence extending even as the core of the organization is thought to be down to an estimated 100 or fewer followers in its traditional home of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas. A Pentagon spokesman said that even that estimate could overshoot the total number who sleep in Afghanistan on any given night, which might be no more than a few dozen.

But wait!, as the narrator on the campy 1960s Batman TV show used to say:

"What we're facing today is a much, much larger global threat," said Seth Jones, an expert at the RAND Corp. who’s advised the Pentagon on Afghanistan and Pakistan. "It’s a more dispersed threat. The threat is decentralizing to a broad network of groups. Al Qaida inspires, but doesn't control, and they work with locals."

What I take from Schofield's report is that there are still anti-American terrorists out in the world. Some of them use the brand name "Al Qaida". But even his sources trying to pump up the threat find it difficult to make any coherent case that they are the group that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 9/11/2001.

So, the logical question is, why do we still need a Cold War level (or higher) of military spending to protect us from the Dead Terrorist? And was Bin Laden's group really even enough of a threat to justify such a massive military establishment? Because that's still the chief bogeyman our national security establishment is using to justify this massive military investment.

What's actually happening is that the US adopted a global-dominance foreign policy strategy after the end of the Cold War, which means we can't allow any "peer competitors" to arise in the world and that being able and ready to intervene in a massive way anywhere in the world is a constant need. A less grandiose foreign policy would require something different.

But under the current foreign policy strategy and the chronic threat inflation that goes with it, it makes a twisted kind of sense when Schofield quotes some guy explaining that a radical group in Nigeria that I'd never seen mentioned before "has already hurt our national interests."

But we still need to be asking, if the War on Terror after 10 years leaves us having to tremble for our lives every time there's a shoot-out in Nigeria or local clans in some godforsaken corner of the Yemeni desert start raising hell with each other - isn't there something wrong with our approach?

Tags: global war on terror, war on terror, osama bin laden

September 11 retrospective: Bruce Lawrence on Osama Bin Laden's strategic thinking

Quoting again today from Bruce Lawrence of Duke University from his edition of one of the English editions of Bin Laden's public pronouncements, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005). In his Introduction, he agrees with sociologist Michael Mann that American military presence and actions in the Middle East lay at the root of the hostility of Bin Laden and his followers to the US. In Mann's words, "As long as America seeks to control the Middle East, he and people like him will be its enemy."

But Lawrence stresses that Bin Laden framed his ideology in religious terms:

Objectively speaking, bin Laden is waging a war against what many - admirers as well as critics - now call the American empire. But it is crucial to note the he himself never uses this vocabulary. The word "imperialism" does not occur once in any of the messages he has sent out [as of the publication of the book]. He defines the enemy differently. For him jihad is is aimed not at an imperium, but at "global unbelief". Again and again, his texts return to this fundamental dichotomy. The war is a religious war. It subsumes a political war, which he can wage with terms appropriate to it, as he demonstrates in his addresses to the people of Europe or of American. Yet the battle in the end is one of faith. [my emphasis in bold]

Because of that religious vision, Lawrence argues against the view that Bin Laden's Al Qai'da was a kind of direct, lineal successor to anti-imperialist terrorist groups like Germany's Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) or Italy's Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades; BR), which were secular groups with their own brands of Marxist-Leninist ideology. (In the quote below addressing the comparison with those groups, Lawrence gives them them perhaps a bit too much credit in articulating a vision of a future society; but his point about their materialist-social focus is valid.)

Lawrence is not agreeing with the Muslim-haters who claim that Bin Laden's view of Islam is correct because Islam is a religion of violence: "It would be wrong either to dismiss these [Qur'anic] references [by Bin Laden] as imaginary, or to take them as representative of contemporary Muslim opinion." Bin Laden's "select reading of scriptural sources and extra-scriptural authority," Lawrence argues, "sits ill with the conscience of the great majority of contemporary Muslims; for all but a few, implacable warfare in the name of jihad is not the sole or the best measure of Islamic loyalty."

The jihadist ideology of Al Qa'ida had its immediate origins in the mujahidin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Lawrence argues that the confidence that Bin Laden took from the Afghan victory over the Soviets and the American withdrawal from Somalia in 1993 was what "originally launched [Bin Laden] on his hugely ambitious undertaking." Bin Laden assumed that the US could be beaten just as the Soviet superpower was in Afghanistan.

This confidence was based on "two great miscalculations," Lawrence argues. One was an overly-expansive generalization from the Afghan experience. Its particular conditions made it an especially favorable staging ground for a guerrilla war against an invading power. "Even so, it required massive amounts of US finance and weaponry, and the full backing of the Pakistani state, for the mujahidin to prevail."

The other was the American withdrawal from Somalia:

As for Somalia, the inconsequential American landings there, more a public relations than strategic operation, were no gauge of the powers of the Pentagon. The effect of both Afghanistan and Somalia seems to have been simply to lure him into illusions of US fickleness and weakness.

What Lawrence is saying here is that however clever Osama bin Laden may have been in staging dramatic terrorist attacks, he was operating from a foolish set of political and military assumptions. The magnification of Bin Laden and "Al Qa'idi" - the actual organization and the mythological bogeyman - into an existential threat to the United States served the interests of Dick Cheney's vision of war and torture. It was not founded in strategic reality.

Lawrence summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of Bin Laden's theology of jihad this way:

Connected to these miscalculations is the nature of his religious vision itself. One of its most striking features, displayed throughout the texts in this book, is the absence of any social dimension. Bin Laden was barred from the kind of analysis that would have allowed him to distinguish the different structural features of the various Muslim societies in which jihad was to be awakened, and made him hesitate in inflecting the notion of "One, Two, Three, Many Afghanistans." Morally, he does denounce a host of evils. Some of them­ - unemployment, inflation, and corruption - are social. But no alternative conception of the ideal society is ever offered. There is an almost complete lack of any social program. This alone makes it clear how distinctive al-Qaeda is as a phenomenon. The lack of any set of social proposals separates it not just from the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades, with which it has some­ times mistakenly been compared, but - more significantly - from the earlier wave of radical Islamism, whose leading thinker was the great iconoclast Sayyid Qutb [whose similar-minded brother was a professor of Osama bin Laden's]. In place of the social, there is a hypertrophy of the sacrificial. Bin Laden's messages rarely hold out radiant visions of final triumph. His emphasis falls far more on the glories of martyrdom than the spoils of victory. Rewards belong essentially to the hereafter. This is a creed of great purity and intensity, capable of inspiring its followers with a degree of passion and prin­cipled conviction that no secular movement in the Arab world has ever matched. At the same time, it is obviously also a narrow and self-limiting one: it can have little appeal for the great mass of believers, who need more than scriptural dictates, poetic transports, or binary prescriptions to chart their everyday lives, whether as individuals or as collective members of a commu­nity, local or national. Above all, there is no rush to restore a Caliphate today. Bin Laden seems at some level to recognize the futility of a quest for restitution [i.e., restoration of the Caliphate]. He sets no positive political horizon for his struggle. Instead, he vows that jihad will continue until "we meet God and get his blessing!" [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: 9/11, bruce lawrence, osama bin laden

September 11 retrospective: Bruce Lawrence on Bin Laden's predicted end and posthumous image

We'll be seeing a flood of 10th-anniversary retrospectives on the 9/11 attacks, some of them obviously more substantial than others. So I'm taking the occasion to offer a few posts of my own for the occasion.

Bruce Lawrence of Duke University edited one of the English editions of Bin Laden's public pronouncements, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005). In his Introduction, he makes a prediction that turned out remarkably accurate this year:

Bin Laden's own fate remains uncertain. Unless he dies a natural death in hiding, it seems inevitable that sooner or later his hunter will catch him. If captured alive, he will doubtless be killed on the spot, as Che Guevara was forty years ago. His captors will know that it would be useless to torture him for information, as they have his lieutenants; while to put him on trial would risk huge embarrassment for those attempting to judge him, given his powers of eloquence and their own record. [my emphasis]

Lawrence isn't defending or romanticizing Bin Laden. He's explaining his perspective. And, in that passage, the perspective of the US and its allies. I was surprised in retrospect to see how firmly he made this prediction about Bin Laden's summary execution.

Lawrence notes that Bin Laden adopted a martyr's pose. Though, again accurately, he predicted that his legend would have some appeal, though not his deeply flawed methods and approach:

His posthumous legend will live on, like that of Guevara, to inspire other such knights [a reference to Bin Laden's self-description as one of "a band of knights"], until such time as different, more humane heroes can attract the idealism of Muslim youth, and find a better way not only to liberate their homelands but also to forge a brighter future for those liberated.

The Arab Awakening is providing some substantial part of that "better way," though obviously it's a process with a hopeful future rather than an accomplished fact.

Tags: 9/11, bruce lawrence, osama bin laden

An American Muslim woman's reaction to Bin Laden's death

This is the report of a Muslim woman who went to Ground Zero in New York just after hearing about Osama bin Laden's death: Mona Eltahawy, No dignity at Ground Zero Guardian 05/03/2011:

It was minutes after President Obama's announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, and I was heeding a friend's suggestion that we – both Muslims – take candles and stand in vigil where the World Trade Centre stood before Bin Laden's footsoldiers took it down.

So it was a shock to find hundreds of others had turned that hallowed ground into the scene of a home crowd celebrating an away victory they hadn't attended, the roots of which they were probably not there to experience or were too young to remember.

There was always something sickening about tourists taking pictures of themselves posing in front of that big gaping hole called Ground Zero. "Me at site of mass slaughter, NYC" as holiday photo caption is wrong in every language, surely. It didn't take 10 minutes for the frat party atmosphere to sicken me. Olympic-style chants of "USA! USA!" I could just about take as a freshly minted American, as of Friday. But "Fuck Osama! Ole ole ole!" crushed any ambition of dignity for the thousands killed, many of whom had jumped hundreds of storeys to their deaths, their bodies shattered to pieces close to where we stood.

Taylor Marsh linked to this article on Twitter, grumping that "Mona Eltahawy's 'No dignity at Ground Zero' reveals her inability to understand the American spirit."

Maybe. My inclination when I heard about the news was to think about the victims of the 9/11 attacks and others who suffered directly and indirectly from Al Qa'ida's terrorist attacks. I'm not inclined to treat the news of a death like that as an occasion for yee-haw celebration.

But I don't regard all the celebratory reactions as reflecting some unworthy impulse. Bin Laden had been built up by the Bush Administration, both political parties and the media as the Hitler of the 9/11 attacks. I certainly felt a feeling of relief at hearing of his death. It did represent for me something like a concluding moment for the "9/11 period," though obviously not all the alleged perpetrators in custody have been put on trial yet.

And I hope that a lot of people do feel that Bin Laden's death should be something like V-J Day for the War On Terror. Al Qa'ida at its most effect was never "Hitler," never an existential threat to the United States. It's long past time to end the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, pull out of the Libya War before we get more deeply involved and start treating peacetime terrorism like the domestic and international law enforcement problem that it is.

Tags: osama bin laden, terrorism, war on terror

Gary Sick assesses Osama Bin Laden's legacy

In the wake of Bin Laden's death, Gary Sick asks Does Islamism Have a Future? Gary's Choices 05/03/2011:

Osama bin Laden was important in creating the image of a global campaign that was immensely attractive to the disaffected and the fanatic. As such, his loss will no doubt be felt. But his theology and his politics had already been discredited to anyone who was willing to devote even a few minutes of objective thought to the subject. He and his campaign were increasingly denounced from Muslim pulpits, by Islamic scholars and even by average citizens who saw the beheadings, the suicide bombings of innocents, and the incitement to religious civil war as an execration.

Al Qaeda's political "solution" was the proposed return to the seventh century utopia of a holy caliphate that, if it ever existed at all, collapsed into civil war within half a dozen years. Like most utopias, this mythical caliphate was a figment of Osama bin Laden’s imagination and provided no solution to the genuine problems of his tortured followers.

With no plausible political goal to offer, and only appalling violence as a means to that end, Osama bin Laden understandably made no real headway. He could sow pain and chaos, but he was never able to change a government or to impose his illusory vision on any group outside his own immediate followers. [my emphasis]

Tags: gary sick, osama bin laden

Should the government make public the video of the Bin Laden raid?

David Sirota makes a persuasive argument that it should in Why we need to see the bin Laden raid video Salon 05/09/2011. Not the photos of the body, the video of the raid itself.

Tags: david sirota, osama bin laden

Is there an Al Qa'ida 2.0?

Moisés Naím in Al Qaeda 2.0 El País 08.05.2011 gives a picture of the status of Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida organization that is very similar to that I heard recently from Anatol Lieven a month ago. Naím writes of the post-Bin Laden Al Qa'ida, "la nueva Al Qaeda es más una inspiración que una organización que actúa siguiendo órdenes emanadas de una sede central." (the new Al Qa'ida is more an inspiration than an organization that acts in accord with orders emanating from central authority.)

Anatol Lieven also thought there was not much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. While he thought it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, he also believed it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

Naím cautions, "Esto no significa que la vieja Al Qaeda haya desaparecido. Osama bin Laden seguía planeando ataques terroristas desde su guarida en Abbottabad." (This doesn't mean that the old Al Qa'ida has disappeared. Osama bin Laden kept on planning terrorist attacks from his refuge in Abbottabad.)

Lieven sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

Naím points out that the biggest challenge for the current jihadist movement, or "Al Qa'ida 2.0", are the democratic upheavals in the Arab world. Those movements are not demanding theocracies, much less a new Islamic caliphate, the nominal goal of Bin Laden. He also notes that the "Al Qa'ida 2.0" movement will have trouble rescuing their "brand." Organizations fighting under the "Al Qa'ida" name have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslim Americans or Europeans. Such an organization "tiene mucho que explicar" (has a lot to explain).

Lieven's pointing to evidence of Bin Laden's original organization still having a dispersed network that worked together with the Afghan Taliban is consistent with observations that Juan Cole makes about the post-Bin Laden quick withdrawal of Taliban fighters from some areas (Taliban, al-Qaeda Flee N. Afghanistan as Morale Collapses with al-Qaeda admission of Bin Laden’s Death Informed Comment 05/07/2011):

Pajhwok News Agency is reporting that in the wake of the death of Usama bin Laden at the hands of US Navy SEALs, Taliban guerrillas in the northeastern Afghan province of Qunduz are fleeing the province.

It appears that the Taliban were still linked to, and perhaps taking direction from, al-Qaeda, more than most analysts had suspected. It also appears that Bin Laden had more of an operational, strategizing role than we had thought.

If it is true that radicals are fleeing Qunduz, and indeed other provinces as well, and heading for safe havens in places like North Waziristan in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt, it is likely primarily because they had direct contact with Usama Bin Laden and now fear that information about them is in American hands, since the SEALS captured his hard drives and thumb drives.

The Taliban and a few Arab al-Qaeda started being active in Qunduz about three years ago, in part in an attempt to block supplies for NATO and the US coming through Tajikistan.

Qunduz, with a population of about 800,000, is said to be about one third or more Pashtun in ethnicity, despite being in the north where most Afghans speak Persian. Qunduz city was among the Taliban’s last outposts in the north when they were forced to withdraw to Qandahar in late fall, 2001 as a result of the US air support to the Northern Alliance. Talibanism in Afghanistan has virtually no audience outside the Pashtuns or Pashto-speakers, who are Sunni Muslims, though it is also true that a majority of Pashtuns reject the Taliban and support the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai (a Pashtun) instead.

The strategic and anti-logistics character of the Taliban campaign in Qunduz raises questions about whether Bin Laden and some lieutenants were not actively directing a war against the US, NATO and Karzai.

That observation in the last paragraph strikes me as unlikely from what we know about how Bin Laden was concealing himself. One of the reports that has been consistent is that he didn't have Internet connections or telephone landlines in his hideout house. He was relying on an individual courier to carry messages. I suppose the fact that he was using a courier shows that he had his fingers in something, or at least hoped to. But the idea that he himself could be playing any kind of central command role in the Taliban's war against NATO seems far-fetched. Not impossible, but really far-fetched. For the same reason, one has to wonder just how much usable information is likely to be found on the hard drives and computers disks seized during the raid.

Tags: afghanistan war, anatol lieven, juan cole, mosés naím, osama bin laden

More details emerge on the search for Bin Laden

Joan McCarter has a very good roundup of commentary on the Bin Laden search and eventual kill, plus worthwhile comments of her own: Congratulations, Mr. President. Now bring the troops home Daily Kos 05/08/2011.

A couple of good recent descriptions of the hunt are Marc Ambinder,
The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden National Journal 05/02-03/2011 and Peter Finn, Ian Shapira and Marc Fisher, The Hunt: A different sort of search requires a new set of tactics Washington Post 05/06/2011. Joan comments:

For all its frightening implications for potential domestic surveillance, the point is that this successful raid should be described as an intelligence and police operation, as a "surgical" special forces operation that relied on good intelligence, careful cooperation, and not brute military force. Despite the valiant efforts and sacrifice of the 100,000 troops we've got in Afghanistan, this operation wasn't a success because of their boots on the ground. ...

Osama bin Laden wasn't found and killed because we still have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or because we are at war. This successful operation provides the justification and the opportunity for President Obama to end both the fighting wars (the mission really has been accomplished) and the false war, the war on terror.

End them both and let America be America again, without the constant fear, the ongoing erosion of civil liberties, the construct as America as victim.

And bring the troops home. [emphasis in original]

Ambinder makes an informative observation about Special Forces missions; "DevGru" refers to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, better known after the final Bin Laden mission as SEAL Team Six:

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That's the code.

And another sign of the decline of military accountability:

JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.

How many media outlets have you seen or heard highlighting that aspect of the story during the understandable praise and gushing over the team that finally got Bin Laden?

Tags: joan mccarter, osama bin laden

Pakistan and the end of Bin Laden

Aljazeera English has a 47-minute discussion on Pakistan, terrorism and the US, posted on YouTube 05/05/2011 PDT:



Here is a 24-minute discussion from a day earlier, which brings out how important India is in Pakistan's foreign policy and how that affects US-Pakistan relations:



Tom Hayden, who has been watching - and opposing - wars for decades, has an interesting speculation based on the fact that Osama bin Laden seems to have been rather surprisingly lightly defended, according to the accounts available when he wrote this. Hayden doesn't present it as anything other than speculation, but it's a clever one (Question: Why was Bin Laden so lightly guarded? Peace and Justice Resource Center 05/03/2011):

Apparently, there was no Internet service at the compound, so online meetings with other Al Qaeda leaders or cadre were difficult or impossible. A courier was Bin Laden's slow mode of communication, not Skype.

Perhaps this suggests a different role by Pakistan. What were they to do? They could not hand Bin Laden over to the Americans. They could not arrest him, jail him, try him, convict him. They could not or would not kill him. But they could shelter him in exchange for an unknown agreement on the parameters of his behavior. They could offer him a life in semi-retirement, perhaps with dialysis treatment. If so, the rent Bin Laden paid must have been significant. This might have been the most pragmatic arrangement at which the Pakistani military could arrive.

Then, last July, the Americans found the trail of the courier and, shortly after, the compound was targeted. This may be the back story of the growing antagonism between the U.S. and Pakistani governments, militaries and spy agencies, even the recent blow-up over the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, arrested and finally released after killing two Pakistani nationals in March. President Obama lied about Davis’ CIA affiliations and American diplomats put on enormous pressure before Davis was released. Davis was investigating Pakistani militants in a top-secret operation, which could mean he was on the trail of Bin Laden.

In this imagined scenario, the Americans became certain that Bin Laden was hidden in the compound, and possibly made Pakistan an offer it could not refuse. We know you have Bin Laden under protective custody, they might have said, and now you must give him up or face the consequences. It remains to be investigated further, but how could it be accidental that the Pakistani military didn’t begin “scrambling their forces,” according to the Times, until the very time the Americans had finished the job, packed up the body, and turned over the women and children to Pakistani soldiers who were conveniently present?

Tags: osama bin laden, pakistan, tom hayden

Robert Fisk on Bin Laden's death

Robert Fisk has been talking and writing about Osama bin Laden after his death. Fisk is one of the few Western journalists who has interviewed Bin Laden in person.





Some recent articles of Fisk's from The Independent:

My deadliest moment with the world's most dangerous men 05/03/2011

A close encounter with the man who shook the world 05/03/2011

Was he betrayed? Of course. Pakistan knew Bin Laden's hiding place all along 05/03/2011

The al-Qa'ida leader knew he was a failure. Now US has turned him into martyr 05/05/2011

Tags: osama bin laden, robert fisk

Stephen Walt on whether the US murdered Bin Laden

Stephen Walt talks a look at the question, Did the United States murder bin Laden? Foreign Policy 05/04/2011. He indicates that he's "inclined to cut them [the Administration] a bit of slack on this one." Based on what we know so far, he thinks "it would hardly be a stretch to imagine Obama sending in the SEALs not with deliberate orders to kill bin Laden, but with instructions that made his death very, very likely." And he also observes that sending in a SEALs team rather than use a drone strike was likely made in part to minimize noncombatant casualties. And also to be able to make a more credible case that we had really killed Bin Laden.

But he leans toward thinking the intent was to take Bin Laden dead rather than alive:

There are two reasons to suspect that we were more interested in killing him than capturing him. The first is the obvious point that having him in custody would have been a major policy challenge. How many terror threats or hostage takings might have accompanied his trial and incarceration? In the abstract, I'd prefer to have put him on trial for his crimes, to draw the sharpest possible contrast between his lawless behavior and the principles of the rule of law that we like to proclaim. But the practical obstacles to that course would have been daunting, and I can understand why the U.S. government might have preferred just taking him out.

The second reason, of course, is that targeted assassinations have become an increasingly favorite tool of U.S. security policy. And it's not just drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen, targeted killings by special forces are one of the key ways that we are prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. And there's certainly some reason to believe that this is how NATO is trying to resolve the civil war in Libya, though of course we will never say so openly. [my emphasis]

As he's explained in another post, targeted assassination is a problematic policy in a number of ways.

Leaving aside the notion of assassinating heads of state, when dealing with any terrorist group, obviously disrupting, imprisoning or otherwise neutralizing their leaders can have a major effect. Especially if it's a matter of a relatively isolated sect, like the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany or the Weather Underground in the US. Although we should note than in those two incidents, the authorities in their respective countries did not concentrate on trying to kill their leaders.

But even isolated groups have some kind of network of sympathizers. When we look at groups founded in tribal societies in which family clan ties are important, like Afghanistan today or (to a significant extent) the American South during Reconstruction, then eliminating the leadership may complicate rather than facilitate counterinsurgency efforts. If you want a terrorist group to lay down its arms and negotiate a peace deal, or even if you want to keep that option open, leaders who are experienced and trusted among the fighters are more likely to be able to make such a deal and see that it's implemented than newer leaders who have to prove their credibility to their followers. Aside from the need of new leaders to prove themselves in military/terrorist operations, there's no guarantee that a new leader will be less effective from the group's side, or more favorable generally from the counterinsurgency's side, than the old ones. Killing a respected leader may make his remaining followers more intransigent.

Israel has practiced targeted assassination for many years against Palestinian leaders. In their case, increasing intransigence and radicalization among the survivors in the terrorist group may have been part of the intention. Or at least an effect that wasn't entirely unwelcome to an Israeli leadership that preferred not to have a negotiated settlement that would likely be acceptable to the Palestinians.

Tags: counterinsurgency, israel, osama bin laden, stephen walt, terrorism

The changing Bin Laden death story

White House press secretary Jay Carney just gave a press conference in which he insisted that Bin Laden was resisting capture. But he said explicitly that Bin Laden was not armed. He could not explain what kind of "resistance" he was offering. He did say a wife of Bin Laden's was in the room and rushed the soldiers. She was shot in the leg.

It's hard to think based on this account that there was any serious attempt to capture the terrorist leader. John Brennan's statements at his press conference on Monday apparently contained claims that somebody just made up, e.g., the propaganda point of Bin Laden using one of his wives as a shield.

Tags: osama bin laden

Howard Fineman on Obama and the death of Osama bin Laden: we finally beat the hippies!

I've never thought Howard Fineman, a generally reliable purveyor of conventional wisdom, was an impressive choice for the Huffington Post's stable of writers. His article on the death of Bin Laden reminds me why; Obama Gets Osama: Goodbye Vietnam The Huffington Post 05/02/2011:

By calmly and meticulously overseeing the successful targeting of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama just proved himself -- vividly, in almost Biblical terms -- to be an effective commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.

Good night, Vietnam. Goodbye, George McGovern's anti-war campaign of 1972. Goodbye, Jimmy Carter's pathetically inept hostage-rescue mission in 1980. Goodbye, Bill Clinton and the draft.

Or so Democrats have at least some reason to hope.

There have been all kinds of reactions all over the map to Bin Laden's death. This is the dumbest one I've come across. Bin Laden's death made Howard Fineman flash back to the days that defined the favorite images of Republican "culture warriors" - and decided it proves that George McGovern and the hippies have finally been exorcised from the Democratic Party!

It just doesn't get much dumber than that!

Tags: culture war, howard fineman, osama bin laden

Bin Laden's death: the original official story

We have initial versions of the military action that ended the life of Osama bin Laden. It will be interesting to see how those stories are amplified as we get more information.

This is a press conference with President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Brennan is one of Obama's worst selections for a national security post.



Here is an account from Haaretz by Natasha Mozgovaya, U.S. had no choice but to kill bin Laden, says U.S. defense official 05/02/2011:

The United States has no choice but to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden during the raid on his hideout in Pakistan, President Barack Obama's top counter terrorism adviser said Monday.

"We certainly were preparing to the possibility to capture him. If we had an opportunity to take him alive we would have done it‬," John Brennan said. The minutes passed like days and the president was very concerned about the security of our personnel. It was very intense. And finally we were informed about the results there was a sigh of relief‬." ...

U.S. national security officials said earlier Monday that special forces set out to kill Osama bin Laden and dump his body in the sea to make it harder for the al Qaeda founder to become a martyr.

"This was a kill operation," one of the officials said.

"If he had waved a white flag of surrender, he would have been taken alive," the official added. But the operating assumption among the U.S. raiders was that bin Laden would put up a fight -- which he did.

Bin Laden "participated" in a firefight between the U.S. commandos and residents of the fortified mansion near the Pakistani capital Islamabad where he had been hiding, the official said.

The official would not explicitly say whether bin Laden fired on the Americans, but confirmed that during the course of the 40-minute operation the U.S. team shot bin Laden in the head. ...

A senior Obama administration official said the commandos knew that bin Laden probably would be killed rather than captured.

"U.S. forces are never in a position to kill if there is a way to accept surrender consistent with the ROE (rules of engagement). That said, I think there was broad recognition that it was likely to end in a kill," the administration official said.

Paul Woodward of War in Context, whose work I don't check often enough, notes in The death of Osama bin Laden 05/02/2011 the careful wording in the official version of Osama's demise:

US forces on a mission to kill or capture (not capture or kill) bin Laden, killed him "in a firefight" in Pakistan. At least that’s what the Times reports. Only further into the report does it reiterate what Obama actually said: "After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."

The White House chooses its words carefully. If bin Laden was killed during the firefight then it's reasonable to assume that this is exactly what Obama would have said. To say that the al Qaeda leader was killed after a firefight seems to suggest he was executed.

The exact manner in which the death occurred may explain why, at least thus far, no photographic evidence has been released. If bin Laden was indeed executed it was most likely for political reasons.

Bin Laden's capture could surely have provided an intelligence bonanza of inestimable value. His subsequent trial would indeed have been a compelling demonstration of what it should mean to deliver justice. But it would also have opened a can of worms.

If bin Laden had been tried in front of a military tribunal then yet again this government would be undermining the strength of the criminal justice system. If on the other hand he was tried in a civilian court, it would be hard for the administration to justify its continued use of military tribunals for any terrorism-related cases.

During a trial, there would be no predicting what kind of strategically damaging information might have been revealed that could have affected US relations with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or other Gulf nations.

And then there would be the headache of deciding where the trial could take place.

Just over a year ago, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who assured Congress that there was no risk of bin Laden ever being read his Miranda rights.

"The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. ... He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he's not captured by us. We know that," Holder said emphatically.

Stephen Walt had an interesting post last week on targeted assassination, Taking Qaddafi out (and not for dinner) Foreign Policy 04/25/2011, occasioned by the obvious decision by NATO to try to kill Muammar Qaddafi as part of the Libya War strategy:

Of course, the United States (and some other countries) have been on this slippery slope for awhile, given our reliance on targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The practice is troubling on at least three grounds. First, due to the imperfect nature of intelligence and the inevitable "fog of war," targeted killings inevitably murder innocents along with the supposedly guilty. Second, and following from the first point, killing innocent bystanders may create more adversaries than it eliminate, thereby undermining the strategic purpose of the program itself.

Third, and perhaps most important of all, going after foreign leaders - no matter how despicable - helps legitimate a tactic that will eventually be visited back upon us. If the world's most powerful countries see fit to kill any foreign leader that they don't like, what's to stop those same (presumably evil) leaders from threatening to pay us back in kind? Targeted assassinations of foreign despots may seem like a cheap and efficient way of solving today's problem, but we won't enjoy living in a world where foreign adversaries think attacking U.S. leaders (including the president and his inner circle) is a perfectly legitimate way of doing business. And notice that making targeted killings more legitimate tends to level the international playing field: you don't have to be a powerful or wealthy state to organize a few hit squads and cause lots of trouble for your enemies.

So even if this attempt at "decapitation" were to succeed in the short-term, the longer-term consequences may not be quite so salutary. [my emphasis]

Walt is specifically addressing the issue of targeting heads of state and government for assassination. But he's raising issues that our policymakers should be taking fully into account.

In another take, Ismail Khan in the Pakistani English-language paper Dawn, Was Osama killed by US troops or his own guard? 05/03/2011 reports on an alternative version given by a source he allows to remain anonymous:

Reports suggest that Bin Laden was shot dead with a single bullet to his head when he resisted capture, but an official indicated that the 54-year-old mastermind of the biggest and most devastating attack on US soil might have been killed by one of his own guards in line with his will to avert his capture.

"From the scene of the gunbattle it doesn't look like he could have been killed at point blank range from such a close angle, while offering resistance," said an official, who visited the scene of the night assault soon after the departure of the US assault team from the sprawling compound in Thanda Choa, now called Bilal Town, at stone’s throw from Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul.

I'm not sure how someone who saw the scene after the US team left carrying Bin Laden's body could have made a judgment about whether Bin Laden had been shot at close range. But that's the report. Khan also reports that one of the American helicopters went down:

One of the two helicopters involved in the assault went down during action and one official who visited the scene said there was no evidence to suggest that it might have been hit by a rocket or shot from the ground.

“There was no evidence of the helicopter having been shot down,” the official said. “From the wreckage it appears to be more a case of a crash,” he said.

But he said the one loud explosion heard during the gunbattle might have been caused by the departing assault team which bombed the chopper into pieces after retrieving their men and completing their mission.

His report also has two Bin Laden wives being left in the compound and another women wounded. But his report doesn't include the dead woman that John Brennan in the video above says had perhaps been used as a human shield to protect Bin Laden.

We'll see how this story develops. I'm skeptical about the Dawn account. But the idea that Bin Laden could have been killed by one of his own men acting under his orders does offer an alternative explanation. One that in international opinion could be more benign for the United States than the notion that it was an intentional assassination. And the dead wife? Well, maybe Dawn's account was more careful than John Brennan's: Osama "human shield" story may be bogus Salon 05/03/2011. He links to stories at Politico and Reuters noting that Brennan's claim may not be that solid.

Steven Thomma reports for McClatchy, which has consistently had some of the best reporting on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, in U.S. hopes to bury rest of al Qaida with bin Laden 05/03/2011:

Americans reveled Monday in the death of Osama bin Laden, a moment the Obama administration hoped would be a pivot point in the long war against terrorism by showing the world that bin Laden lived and died as a hypocrite and a coward, and that his terror network is headed toward destruction as well. [my emphasis]

Thomma reminds us:

In fact, bin Laden had little support in the Muslim world, according to country-by-country polls by the Pew Research Center. In six Muslim countries polled this year, his support was highest in the Palestinian territories. Even there, only 34 percent of Muslims said they trusted him to do the right thing. That approval dropped to 25 percent in Indonesia, 22 percent in Egypt, 13 percent in Jordan, 3 percent in Turkey and 1 percent in Lebanon. [my emphasis]

Not surprisingly, alternative theories of Bin Laden's death are already circulating in Pakistan, according to another Dawn report from AFP, Theories on bin Laden's death take root in Pakistan 05/03/2011.

Tags: osama bin laden, pakistan

"Al Qa'ida" after Bin Laden

This is a 24-minute report from Aljazeera English's Inside Story program on the death of Bin Laden and what "Al Qa'ida" is today.



Juan Cole provides a long obituary essay on Bin Laden discussing his career as terrorist leader in Obama and the End of Al-Qaeda Informed Comment 05/02/2011:

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don't want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil. [my emphasis]

He also reminds us of Osama's early days as a terrorist leader:

The Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress took the small Carter administration program that supported a Muslim insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan and vastly expanded it, ultimately to the tune of billions of dollars. Reagan also twisted the arm of Saudi King Fahd to match US expenditures. Seven major Afghan guerrilla groups were fostered and given CIA training in camps. The Soviets fought back viciously. In that decade, perhaps a million Afghans were killed, 3 million were displaced to Pakistan, 2 million were displaced to Iran, and 2 million were displaced inside Afghanistan. In a country of, at that time, perhaps 15 million persons. It was Apocalypse Now, Kabul version. The two opponents were not attractive. The Communist regime was a cruel dictatorship. The Mujahidin were a mix of tribal and religious forces, but some groups were radical fundamentalists, as with the Hizb-i Islami or Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, the most bloodthirsty of the Mujahidin. He got a lion’s share of the CIA money (he is today a die-hard opponent of the US whose men have killed many US troops in Afghanistan).

When Reagan convinced King Fahd to help get up a covert paramilitary to fight the Soviets (Reagan really liked private, unaccountable militias; he also backed them in Central America), Fahd had his ministers look around for a fundraiser who could get money from private sources in Saudi Arabia for the Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden was chosen, being a well-known socialite who also had a serious and religious side. Bin Laden jetted back and forth between the mosques of Saudi Arabia and the the Pakistani city of Peshawar, his headquarters in the struggle against the Soviets. The “Arab Afghans” who gathered around him may not have gotten direct CIA training for the most part, though some likely did, but they learned everything they needed to know about setting up cells and carrying out covert operations from the Afghans who had been through the CIA schools.

Tags: al qaida, osama bin laden

Shrub Bush on Bin Laden's death: total absence of self-reflection

It's not that George W. Bush ever presented himself to the public as particularly self-reflective or even especially serious.

But his reaction to the news of Osama bin Laden's demise (from Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich, US forces kill Osama bin Laden The Independent 05/02/2011) still surprised me by its cluelessness:

The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done. [my emphasis]

For a man who will have potential arrest and indictment hanging over him for the rest of his life for torture and even potentially murder in connection with the torture program, it takes some combination of incredible arrogance and lack of appreciation of one's own vulnerabilities to say something like, "No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."

There is a sense, of course, in which that is true. The torture issue isn't going away. There will be a formal reckoning with it someday. For the good of the United States, I hope it's sooner rather than later.

The Obama Administration should take a hint from Bush's statement and do its duty to prosecute the torture crimes of the previous Administration. And of this one, if the evidence warrants it.

Tags: accountability for torture, george w bush, osama bin laden, torture

Osama bin Laden dead: So now we can end all our wars?

To ask the question is to answer it. And if I didn't already know the answer, Lara Logan was on CBS a few minutes after I heard the news Sunday evening assuring us that the War on Terror was "by no means" over.

This is President Obama's announcement speech from late Sunday: [NOTE 05/02/2011, 9:50 PDT: this video from the White House shows as no longer available; the White House YouTube channel and it says the embedding is being disabled by request. What the heck is going on?]



[So here's the PBS Newshour version instead:]



This is a biographical sketch of Bin Laden from Aljazeera English:



We're spending more today in real terms for the military than we did at the height of the Cold War. The justification has been "Al Qa'ida" and The Terrorists. But it's been apparent for a while that Bin Laden's own Al Qa'ida organization as it existed in 2001 has not been operative for a long time. Bin Laden was obviously an important target because of his responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. But his importance as a terrorist mastermind on an ongoing basis has probably been minimal.

Former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley tweeted, "Does #binLaden's death matter? There are franchises around the world, but he was a major unifying force. The movement now lacks a center."

A center of sort for jihadists, maybe. But the current movement against the Arab dictatorships took little inspiration from Bin Laden or the jihadists, based on what we've seen so far.

It's good for the reputation of the US that Bin Laden was caught dead rather than alive. It would have been great if he had been captured, brought to America to stand trial and convicted in a civilian court under the American justice system. But this Administration would have been unlikely to deal with him that way. They would probably have sent him to Guantanamo and waited years to give him a military commissions trial, or just keep him in prison permanently. That would have made him more of a martyr to jihadists than his death in battle will.

Tags: osama bin laden

Anatol Lieven on Pakistan and on the Afghanistan War

I heard a presentation yesterday at UC-Berkeley by Anatol Lieven, a former journalist who covered Pakistan extensively who is now Professor of War Studies at King's College in London. He has spent time fairly recently in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which has been the scene of conflict between the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani Taliban.

I asked him what he thought from his research was the current state of Bin Laden's original Al Qa'ida organization. His picture is that there's no much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. He said that while it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, that it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

He sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

His picture of the current relationship between the Pakistani army and intelligence with Pakistani jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) that concentrate on the Kashmir issue is that they have a basic deal. They refrain from attacks in Western countries, which is particularly good for Britain, because a lot of the Pakistani immigrants to Britain come from the Punjab region near Kashmir and a lot of them are very sympathetic to LET. And mostly they have to refrain from attacks on India at the moment, after the huge Mumbai incident, with the promise they'll get to hit India again in the future. But they pretty much have a green light to help the Afghan Taliban against NATO and the Karzai government. Including the occasional target with special connection to India.

He stressed how much Pakistanis see the Afghanistan War in the context of the India-Pakistan conflict, with the current Afghan government being seen as pro-Indian. This is something that seems to only occasionally peek into American commentary on the war, so far as I've noticed. And this is a big part of what makes US-Pakistani relationship chronically troubled.

Lieven mentioned that the Pakistani elite tend to have a very Western orientation in terms of speaking English and sending their kids to Western universities and also in terms of their conception of property, etc. But he also said that many Pakistani officials would like to dump the current unsatisfying alliance with the US altogether and become an even closer ally to China.

He told about one factor I hadn't heard at all before. He said that it was common among Pashtun families (I took it he meant mainly in Pakistan) to send one son from the family to serve with the Pakistani Army and another to serve with the Afghanistan Taliban. When one of the two groups comes around looking for the son on the other side, the family can say, oh, that son's a bum and drug addict and a loser, but our good, sensible son is on *your* side.

He also said that the US military's perception that a lot of Afghan Taliban flee "across the border" to Pakistan is mistaken. What often happens, and what happened a lot in 2001-2, was that they simply go home and bury their weapons and wait to see how the military tide turns.

Lieven said that in his conversations with American military officials, they don't have a clear idea of what winning would mean. But they are haunted by their perceptions of Vietnam, which represents a clear idea of what losing would mean, the image of the helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975 being a dramatic example. This is an interesting observation, because to hear official Pentagon spokespeople tell it, our armed forces haven't lost a single battle since probably Custer's Last Stand. And, more specifically, there is a widespread assumption in the officer corps that US *won* the Vietnam War militarily but that our victorious generals were stabbed in the back by the weak-kneed politicians and gutless civilians back home. (Though obviously not all versions are expressed that crassly.)

Lieven also says in that connection that the Pentagon right now tends to view an exit view a general peace agreement with the Taliban as being a kind of unacceptable defeat. He thinks the reports we hear of negotiations with the Taliban represents what he says was a similar approach by the Soviets to make one-off deals with individual commanders. But he thinks the Pentagon is pretty dead set against any general agreement with the Afghan Taliban. He said we shouldn't underestimate the Pentagon's determination to fight on for years to avoid what they see as a humiliating defeat.

Which tells me that if it's left up to our generals, we'll never stop fighting in Afghanistan. That seems to have been the case in Iraq, too; McCain's promise in 2008 of 100 year's war in Iraq reflected something like that attitude. But in Iraq's case, the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad eventually insisted on a status-of-force agreement that pulls out remaining US combat troops this year. And I'm already seeing some reports that the Pentagon is trying to find a way around that.

Lieven also said that it's his sense that the Pentagon is very cautious about any idea of going into Pakistan in a ground war. Which he thinks is a very appropriate caution. He has the sense that sending US ground troops into Pakistan on a large scale would probably wreck the US position completely in the Muslim world. He thinks that the operatives that the US has on the ground there now are "hostages to fate," as the Raymond Davis case illustrated so dramatically this year.

Tags: al qaida, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, osama bin laden, pakistan