I have wanted Osama bin Laden to be killed or captured for more than a decade, but when he was shot dead by US commandos this week something was not right. However evil the enemy, there was something ignoble about the public jubilation, the beer-drinking and yelling on American streets at the news of his killing.
In a flash, the country felt as if it had been taken back to the unhealed wounds of September 11, 2001. But no act of revenge, no matter how significant, can bring recompense for or closure to those horrific events.
In stark contrast to American jubilation on the airwaves and in the streets, Arab media coverage was cautious, sober and muted. Where broadcasters on Fox News exchanged high-fives on air, al-Jazeera was solemn. But beneath the attempted objectivity was something more disturbing. Its Arabic language website has become a place to pay homage to bin Laden. Young people from across the Middle East left comments condemning the West, accusing the US of lies and lauding bin Laden as a "martyr" (if he was indeed killed, as many queried) and suggesting that "a thousand bin Ladens were born today".
Bin Laden is more valuable to al-Qaeda and global jihadism dead. He has spent the past decade in hiding, issuing the occasional statement but increasingly fading from the Muslim imagination. When I visited Cairo last month, he was seen as remote and irrelevant to the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood that I met. This week they respectfully referred to him as "Sheikh Osama" — a title reserved for respected clerics, which he was not. But in death, he is fast becoming an icon of a new sort.
Without doubt, the US was right to remove bin Laden, but it is wrong to think that his death will weaken al-Qaeda. Yes, a colossal psychological blow has been dealt, but al-Qaeda is no longer a mere organisation, but a global brand, an idea, a philosophy that now has its first Saudi martyr from the holy lands of Islam.
Al-Qaeda can, arguably, become stronger in years to come. After all, the killing of the Muslim Brotherhood's leader in Egypt in 1949 did not weaken it. The hanging of Sayyid Qutb in 1956 produced a generation of jihadists. Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were both Qutbists. More recently, in 2006 when Ahmed Yassin, Hamas' founder and charismatic leader, was killed, Israelis thought that Hamas would be weakened. Today, it is stronger than ever, and governs Gaza.
Similarly, bin Laden's "martyrdom" will capture the imagination of a new generation of Muslims. Little wonder, then, that John Brennan, President Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser, went out of his way to puncture bin Laden's glamour by claiming that he was a coward who used his wife as a human shield against US soldiers. And, Mr Brennan went on to say, he was not the heroic ascetic who struggled in the Afghan mountains, but a millionaire who hid in luxury in a relatively wealthy town.
That bin Laden died in Pakistan — a nation already in denial about the extremism in its midst, and that quickly blames India and the West for all its ills — should concern us too. For a decade now, its politicians and military leaders have repeatedly denied that he was hiding in the country, and some even claimed that he was dead. Now we know the truth and Pakistan's image has been further reduced in the eyes of the world to that of a terror hub misgoverned by a feeble State. This embarrassment, combined with the lure of bin Laden's "martyr" status and the widespread madrassa networks, risks further radicalising a generation of young angry Pakistanis.
The US should tread carefully in Pakistan. Its drone attacks are deeply unpopular with ordinary Pakistanis and the nation's politicians jealously guard their sovereignty. Now the world's most wanted terrorist is dead, the US should consider halting the drone attacks and build better relations with Pakistan's military and political factions.
While the battle for hearts and minds continues in Pakistan, bin Laden's death will have its most immediate impact in the world's most volatile region — the Middle East. And no issue is more sensitive, a more powerful rallying cry for extremists, than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The recent unity agreement between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza has put the Israeli Government on the defensive, because it is argued that Israel's reluctance to make peace with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, led him to embrace Hamas. If Mr Abbas could not give the Palestinians peace, some said, at least he could give his people unity.
Political realists in America and Europe would have pressured Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, for practical concessions and into making peace, however fragile, with the Palestinian Authority, urging him not to be so intransigent with Hamas, which was elected by the majority in Gaza.
But the statement of Ismail Haniya, the Hamas Prime Minister of the Gaza Strip: "We condemn the assassination of a Muslim and Arab warrior and we pray to God that his soul rests in peace" is a godsend to Mr Netanyahu. Rightly, Israelis will now ask how their country can sign peace treaties with an organisation that nakedly supports bin Laden, a man who fought for the destruction of Israel. In death, he has left Israeli hardliners further strengthened, Palestinian moderates weakened and peace a more distant prospect.
As the Arab-Israeli conflict becomes a certain flashpoint in the months ahead, bin Laden's lasting legacy could be to force the Arab Spring in a new direction. He was irrelevant to the Arab Spring in life, but could yet derail it from his sea grave. Any conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will now easily inflame the entire region with anti-Israeli and anti-Western sentiment, something that has been so powerfully absent in the street protests.
Celebrations in the West should not blind us to the legacy of Osama bin Laden's death. The thousands of messages left on al-Jazeera's website give us an insight into the "martyr" that he has become. His life and death are propaganda material for al-Qaeda's cause, the magnet for a new generation of jihadist recruits in Pakistan and beyond. But the most immediate knock on our door from bin Laden's ghost will be heard in Jerusalem and its neighbouring lands.
- Ed Husain is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC and author of The Islamist
[ Itamaraty.go.br ]
