To give the devil his awful due, Osama bin Laden was the greatest terrorist of the modern age. He took what had been disparate, disorganized terrorist groups and reshaped them into a disciplined and immensely ambitious organization, Al Qaeda, with the singular goal of waging jihad on the West in general and the United States in particular. Its terrorist prowess was never more evident than on that horrible day of Sept. 11, 2001.
Now that Bin Laden is dead, the most pressing question we need to ask is: Will his death make a difference? It is, of course, symbolically important that the United States hunted down the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And it will have political ramifications for President Obama, which I leave to others to debate.
But the thing that matters most right now is whether the world today is safer than it was on Sunday, when Bin Laden was still among the living. Though it is not an easy question to answer, it seems to me that there are four areas where it ought to be asked:
THE ARAB SPRING The commentariat was quick to note the delicious irony that Bin Laden’s death coincided with the citizen uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere. The Arab Spring has shown that millions of Muslims have zero interest in the hard-line theocracy favored by Al Qaeda. What they yearn for instead is freedom and democracy. Bin Laden’s death merely put an exclamation point on the fact that his influence in the region had diminished considerably in the decade since 9/11.
But Lawrence Wright, the author of “The Looming Tower,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning book about Al Qaeda, goes a step further. He’s convinced that Bin Laden’s death could help prevent the Arab Spring from sputtering out.
“As long as he was around, he created an alternative narrative,” said Wright. “When the moment comes that the democratic movement falters — and there always is such a moment — Al Qaeda could say: We told you so. The fact that he is gone makes it more likely for the Arab Spring to complete its reformation cycle.”
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN Ever since he came into office, President Obama has insisted that our presence in Afghanistan was directly related to the ongoing threat from Al Qaeda. Ten years in, though, the war has no end in sight and dwindling public support. Liberal groups like the Brave New Foundation are already saying that Bin Laden’s death has “ended the rationale” for the war.
It’s not just liberals, either. James Lindsay, a senior vice president of that establishment bulwark Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that the president could use Bin Laden’s death to say that America’s “goal has been achieved” — and use it as an excuse to wind down the war. Whether the president will take such a step is unclear. But it’s now at least feasible.
TERRORISM ITSELF Michael Nacht, a former Defense Department official who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that Bin Laden’s death will diminish the terrorist threat to the United States. Nacht compared terrorism in the Bin Laden era to a “fatal disease.” Now, he says, it’s more like a chronic illness: “It can still cause you trouble, but it’s not a mortal theat.”
But this may turn out to be wishful thinking. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda had maybe 200 members; today, it is vaster and “more far-reaching than before the U.S. sought to take it down.” Independent offshoots have sprung up in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. New terrorist leaders include Nasir al-Wahishi, who leads Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has been involved in several terrorist plots, including the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day in 2009. Although America does a much better job of rooting out planned attacks, the threat remains very real, with or without Bin Laden.
RELATIONS WITH THE MUSLIM WORLD Let’s face it: Much of the Muslim world today is deeply distrustful of anything America does. For this, certainly, a good portion of the blame goes to the misguided invasion of Iraq and its aftermath — which, in turn, was a response to 9/11 and Bin Laden. In that sense, America played right into Bin Laden’s hands.
The clock can’t be turned back just because he’s dead. The distrust remains strong. A friend who recently returned from Turkey — a Muslim country that is ostensibly a close ally — told me that the Turkish media were united in their virulent opposition to NATO’s actions in Libya, even though those actions were intended to prevent a cruel dictator from killing his own people.
“The image of Westerners dropping bombs on Muslims is very hard for Muslims to accept,” he said.
One hopes that this is not Bin Laden’s enduring legacy. But that’s something only we can fix.
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