Bin Laden wants last laugh
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Ejaz Haider wonders whether the Americans in particular, and the West in general, are playing into bin Laden’s hands
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His military strategy — draw the West in a conflict through spectacular attacks on its interests — is essentially political in nature. This is why it is not geared towards controlled violence. He is addressing us; not the Americans. He wants the West to attack with all the viciousness at its disposal. The greater the destruction, the better for forcing people in the Islamic world to rise and decide which side they are on
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For better or worse, the first round goes to the bin Laden-Mullah Omar duo. The bombing has failed to pulverize the militia, the much talked about defections have not materialised and the US special forces’ first, and so far the only, foray into Afghanistan has two dead and several injured to show for its success. With increasing civilian casualties the coalition has begun to fray at the edges with pressure mounting on the governments not only in the Islamic world but also in Europe. The reluctance of Washington to commit ground troops promises a drawn-out war. To add to it, the political breakthrough — the post-Taliban or Taliban-alternative dispensation — is nowhere in sight.
But this is not all. Chances are that bin Laden may have the last laugh. Consider.
Conventional wisdom on unconventional warfare says that the more spectacular the terrorist attack(s), the greater the mobilization by the adversary to respond to it and, in inverse proportion, the lesser the ability of the terrorist group(s) to force the adversary into a negotiation mode. In other words, terrorist groups need to pitch violence at a level where, while highlighting the point they are trying to make, they should, nevertheless, be able to leave room for negotiating the issue. This means that like the state actors, terrorist groups also need to integrate violence with a political strategy, avoiding a need to force the adversary into total mobilization that leaves no room for a political compromise.
It is on this basis that western experts have been content with the explanation that the September 11 attacks were born of hatred and seething anger and did not evince a strategy. On the surface, Al-Qaeda does not appear to have a political dimension. Bin Laden does not plan to negotiate with the US. Did he then sanction the attack on the US — if indeed that is correct — merely because he hates the Americans?
In his brilliant analysis in last week’s TFT, Salman Tarik Kureshi ( Of Icons, Revolutionaries and Terrorists ) writes: “…Al Qaeda and other similar organisations are not affiliated with any mass political or revolutionary movement. Their tactics include neither electoral campaigns, nor mass mobilization, nor armed uprisings. More, no explicit social vision, political programme or economic manifesto has been proclaimed. What one hears of is injustices to the Islamic world and talk of ‘revenge’ and ‘anger’.”
Kureshi therefore likens bin Laden to the Russian nihilists, who found in the character of Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons a prototype, “committed to political violence for its own sake”.
There are indeed many similarities between bin Laden and members of Alexander Herzen’s The Will of the People movement. But there are as many differences. Nihilism began with total negation and aspired to a value, in Albert Camus’ remarkable description, “still to come”. Writes Camus: “A value to come is…a contradiction in terms, since it can neither explain an action nor furnish a principle of choice as long as it has not been formulated. But the men of 1905, tortured by contradictions, really did give birth, by their very negation and death, to a value which will henceforth be imperative and which they brought to light in the belief that they were only announcing its advent”.
Bin Laden is announcing the advent not of a value still to come but one that his puritanism tells him was revealed 1500 years ago and then lost by the Muslims. He is negating, surely, the historical accretions as well as the modern international security architecture, but only in confirmation of that value. And while bin Laden and what he stands for have to be contextualised, that does not take away the seemingly transcendental appeal of his message. For the followers, the message is non-temporal and non-spatial.
But if there is nothing political about Al Qaeda, would bin Laden end up as a nihilist? The question presupposes the apolitical nature of bin Laden’s strategy, which is incorrect. Bin Laden’s strategy is essentially political. He does not aim to negotiate with the West; he wants to exploit the fault-line within the Islamic world. And his political weapon is the people and the political parties within the Islamic world who are expected to rise up for his cause and topple the corrupt governments of the Islamic world.
His military strategy — draw the West into a conflict through spectacular attacks on its interests — is essentially political in nature. This is why it is not geared towards controlled violence. He is addressing us; not the Americans. He wants the West to attack with all the viciousness at its disposal. The greater the destruction, the better for forcing people in the Islamic world to rise and decide which side they are on. This can only be achieved through a sharpening of the internal conflict the reasons for which transcend bin Laden but the existence of which he has employed brilliantly to his own ends. As for social and economic programmes, there will be time for them yet.
The success of bin Laden’s strategy is clear from what he has forced Washington into doing. Any drawn-out campaign will surely build up the pressure on governments in the Islamic world and if the US, in its frustration, were to employ weapons of mass destruction to get to him, he would indeed have made his death an apotheosis. |
