The 9/11 Wars (83 page)

The second element seen repeatedly over previous years and reinforced by the events of early 2011 was the contingent nature of the appeal of democracy. As stressed previously, there is nothing in the norms, customs and values of Muslim majority countries that is essentially incompatible with any given political system. In Iraq ‘democracy’ had been rejected by different communities for a variety of reasons. Chief amongst them was that democracy itself had become associated with an accelerated and damaging process of Westernization, with brutal measures of economic liberalization and with the mismanagement typical of the occupation. In Afghanistan, a similar situation prevailed. There too the word ‘democracy’ had acquired negative connotations for large numbers of people. Pollsters in 2010 found that for many Afghans ‘democracy’ did not simply mean elections and parliamentary politics but ‘an entire package of Western liberal values, where freedom is equated with an absence of rules, immorality, and secularism’.
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The same was also true, to an extent, in Pakistan, where a government drawn from a Westernized elite continually risked being seen as distant from authentic national values and was forced to compensate with populist measures and rhetoric, particularly against the USA, as a result. In those theatres that had hitherto been at the heart of the 9/11 Wars, democracy, though in theory nothing more than a neutral system, had become synonymous with an unwelcome process of Westernization. But in Egypt and Libya the context was very different. In Egypt the protests were against a leader who had been backed by the West for longer than most of the protestors had been alive and who was pursuing a liberal economic agenda in line with the recommendations of international institutions such as the World Bank. After surrendering his nuclear weapons programme in 2003, Colonel Gaddafi too had been viewed as an ally and commercial partner by London, Paris and, increasingly, Washington. For the protestors in Cairo and then in Benghazi, democracy thus was seen not as a foreign import alien to local culture and values which had been imposed upon them but the opposite.
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Democracy was something denied them by their leaders with the complicity of the West. It did not mean Westernization but simply the freedom to chose one’s own government. There was therefore no conflict between being a ‘campaigner for democracy’ and being an Egyptian, a Libyan, and an Arab or a Muslim.

Third, the events in Egypt and elsewhere showed the complex relationship between the growing social and religious conservatism of many Arab and Islamic societies and formal politics. Again, this has also been seen elsewhere, in Pakistan, for example, or in Indonesia. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood played a minor role in the upheaval’s early stages though its well-organized activists were important in later phases. In part this was due to the movement’s elderly leadership’s early tactical miscalculations but it was also because the narrative within which the protests were framed was not a religious one. Yet the
informal
influence of Islamism – of which the fundamental project is the appropriation of the modern state, not its destruction – on the behaviour, culture and worldviews of very large numbers of people over recent decades and particularly during the 9/11 Wars in places such as Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Jordan, as well as in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco and Indonesia and elsewhere, could not be doubted. So, though surveys had showed that 59 per cent of Egyptians believed that democracy was preferable to any other form of government, the same polls also revealed that 85 per cent also thought that Islam’s influence in politics was positive.
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A crowd of 200,000 turned out to hear Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the conservative Egyptian theologian who had last preached in his homeland thirty years before and who had a decade earlier tried to dissuade the Taliban from destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas, lead Friday prayers in Tahrir Square and speak of an ‘unfinished revolution’.
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Before the courthouse in Benghazi in the second week of March, a reporter noted that, behind those shouting ‘Free Libya’ and playing Arab pop music over loudspeakers, was another crowd, twenty ranks deep and chanting prayers. ‘Re-Islamization’ – the wave of conservatism that had spread across the Islamic world through the 9/11 Wars – might not have brought electoral success to the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist groups but had meant a different sort of quieter victory. This did not mean that the Egyptian protestors or the Libyan ‘revolutionaries’ or those risking the wrath of security forces in Syria, Bahrain or elsewhere were not committed democrats or that they did not believe in pluralism. But it did not make them secular either. Their religious culture and identity may have shifted out of the sphere of traditional political activity but was deep and strong nonetheless.

Fourthly, the demonstrations in Cairo and in other Middle Eastern cities and the fighting in Libya also saw a return and a reappropriation of each respective country’s flag. This again reinforced trends seen elsewhere and over previous years. A thirty-two-year-old mother of three in the Yemen who had been leading demonstrations against the veteran president, Ali Abdullah Saleh – in power three years longer than even Mubarak had been – told one reporter that there was ‘a race between Yemen and Algeria to see who would be next’, revealing a sense of national pride that many had discounted as impossible in a region rent by tribalism, kinship ties or religion.
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The 9/11 Wars had not only made clear, whatever the hyperbole about globalized identities, the sheer parochialism of the worldview of most people but also shown the remarkable resilience of the nation state, despite the obituaries prematurely written in the 1990s. Even militants in Pakistan had chosen to be the ‘Pakistani Taliban’. The Afghan Taliban, for their part, went to great lengths to underline their nationalist credentials, which at the very least suggested that their leaders appreciated the resonance such rhetoric had. Only outsiders had ever seriously suggested the break-up of Iraq. Indeed, one of the many reasons al-Qaeda had lost support in ‘the land of the two rivers’ was that its attempt to appropriate local patriotic sentiment by renaming its affiliates ‘the Islamic State of Iraq’ had offended local nationalists, including potential allies among other insurgent groups and particularly former Ba’athists. The insults hurled at Tunisian president Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saleh and others often revolved around the idea of ‘treachery’. But those insulted were accused of being a traitor not to their religion, the key element of the Islamic militant discourse, but to the nation. Even protestors in the obviously artificial states of Bahrain or Kuwait, whose historic roots are slender, asserted their patriotic credentials as they demanded reform. Given the choice between the ‘flat’ globalized pan-Islamism of the extremists, with its almost total lack of local specificity, and ‘the nation’, the choice of the vast majority was clear. The Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat Islami and other ‘classic’ or ‘moderate’ political Islamists had long recognized this and junked – or at least postponed – the universalizing ‘pan-Islamic’ project in favour of nationally based political and social activity. The wisdom of this pragmatic strategic choice was amply demonstrated when revolution finally came.

The challenge this new pluralist, democratizing nationalism posed in the spring of 2011 to al-Qaeda’s internationalist ideologues and propagandists, coming on top of the evident rejection of their ideas and tactics by so many over previous years, was evident. Neither bin Laden’s organization nor local groups, affiliated or otherwise, played even a marginal role in the upheavals that shook Tunisia and Egypt. The end to the rule of President Mubarak had been one of the primary aims in the minds of the founders of al-Qaeda back in the late 1980s, yet it took almost a month before the group made a statement on the most significant popular upheaval in the Arab world for many decades. The delay spoke volumes. The message when it came was tired and irrelevant. One significant component of the dissent sweeping the Middle East was the impatience and frustration felt by the young at being lectured by their elders, whether those elders, supposed to be held in such deference but so often incompetent or self-seeking or both, were eighty-two-year-old presidents, aged generals, kings, establishment scholars or radical ideologues. This appeared to have been entirely lost on the al-Qaeda senior leadership. Dismissing Mubarak as ‘the biggest Arab Zionist’, fifty-nine-year-old Ayman al-Zawahiri warned that democracy meant ‘that sovereignty is subject to the desires of the majority, without committing to any quality, value or creed’.
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His views on Egypt could not have been more distant from the sentiments expressed by those participating in the unrest and apparently shared by so many others. The senior leadership of al-Qaeda had apparently little to say about events in Libya either, even as once again a Western-led military operation was launched against an Arab, Muslim-majority state. In Tunisia, it had been the spectacular and public suicide of fruit and vegetable seller Mohammed Bouazizi – in which no one else was hurt – that had set off the uprising that overturned the regime of ben Ali. It was almost impossible to imagine an act that would undermine the tactics of al-Qaeda – suicides in which many people, often entirely innocent, were killed or maimed – more effectively. The same could be said for demonstrators in Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere, all of whom were resolutely non-violent. The geographic, organizational, ideological and cultural marginalization of both al-Qaeda in particular and of extremist radical Islam more generally had been increasingly evident for several years. The upheavals that shook the Arab and Islamic worlds in the early spring of 2011 made it blindingly obvious. Throughout them all, bin Laden remained silent.

However, despite so much apparent justification for a rare if relative optimism about the future evolution of state and society in the Middle East, two final elements nonetheless gave pause for thought. The first was uncertainty about the degree to which the young, web-surfing, often highly educated urban-based activists who had led the protests – described by
Time
,
Newsweek
and other major publications as ‘the generation that is changing the world’ – actually were as representative of their societies as they were portrayed to be in the West. The courage and organizational capabilities of such men and women were undoubted. But the question of how widely people in small towns, in rural areas or in the slums, whether young or old, shared their values and vision of the future still remained to be resolved. The second element that should have tempered the hopes of a shining new future, justifiable though they might have been, was the weight of expectation the events of the spring of 2011 had generated. For the successive uprisings had revealed the depth of the problems – social, political, economic – confronting the region. A quick historical survey showed the extent to which it had always been the young that had brought change, backing successive projects of reform and national revival, in the region’s recent history. Each of these projects – secular nationalism, pan-Arab Socialism, Islamism, post-Islamist local violent militancy – had disappointed. It was this series of failures that had made bin Laden’s new hybrid blend of religion, politics, tradition and innovation so attractive and had led, in the late 1990s, a small but significant number of young men to set out for the camps of Afghanistan. If, as a new transformative ideology swept the region in early 2011, there was one thing of which all observers could be sure it was that renewed disappointment would cut deep into the fragile fabric of already battered societies and would affect the young, now as expectant and as motivated as ever before, more than anyone. The challenge of meeting these expectations was a very great one.

THE END OF BIN LADEN

Bin Laden had in fact been working on a new communiqué giving his views on the Arab Spring. Recorded some time in March or April, it would only be released posthumously. On May 2, just after midnight, the fifty-four-year al-Qaeda leader was shot dead by American special forces in the bedroom of a three-storey house set behind high walls in the northern Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. By the time the speech was finally uploaded on to an extremist internet forum, its author had been dead for three weeks.

Bin Laden did not die as either he or his followers had hoped. Unarmed at the moment of death, neither he nor the three other men in the house put up any significant resistance. There was no spectacular martyrdom. The seventy-nine Navy SEALs who assaulted the compound came under fire for a few moments at the beginning of the raid, but that was all. The al-Qaeda leader was surrounded not by loyal retainers fighting to the last but by his three wives, his children and grandchildren. Bin Laden’s twenty-two-year-old son Khaled was killed with his father. Their bodies were flown out to an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea and, after some kind of religious rite had been performed, slid beneath the waves.

The other two men killed in the assault were Pakistani brothers. One of them had inadvertently led the CIA to bin Laden. His name was Arshad Khan, though for many years the agency had only known his
kunya
, or
nom de guerre
, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti. He had long been of interest, ever since his name had surfaced repeatedly in the interrogations of detainees in the years after 9/11. He was clearly trusted and relatively senior, a veteran associate of the leadership. His exact role, however, was unclear. Major figures such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed were evasive when questioned about him, encouraging the CIA to focus further resources on tracking him down.

In 2007, the agency discovered that their target was not al-Kuwaiti after all but a man called Mohammed Arshad Khan, who, though he had brought up in the Gulf state, was of Pakistani nationality. Fluent in Arabic, Urdu and Pashto, Khan could communicate with foreign militants and locals in the North West Frontier Province as well as more generally across Pakistan. One reason for the breakthrough was a new understanding, in part gleaned from operations in Iraq, of the nature of militant groups. Instead of working their way up the vertical hierarchy of al-Qaeda, investigators had built up a picture of horizontal networks instead, creating vast maps of the potential connections and functions of target individuals. In 2009, they got a phone number for Arshad Khan. Using new software and communications technology to detect phone calls and emails and then further map the webs of connections between them, the CIA created models of his personal relationships. A year later, Pakistani agents working for the Americans located their target in Peshawar. He was followed to the Abbottabad house, which was put under observation. By April, no positive identification of bin Laden had been achieved, but the tall man who was seen pacing the garden of the home alone for long periods was judged to be the al-Qaeda leader, and a raid went ahead.
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‘We can say to those families who lost loved ones to al-Qaeda’s terror: justice has been done,’ Obama told the American nation in a television address hours later. The death should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and dignity, the president said. Whatever the arguments over international law, sovereignty or the manner of bin Laden’s killing, it was difficult to argue with either sentiment.
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