Monday morning blues are not easy to shake off. Not unless little birds keep tweeting about the death of Osama Bin Laden (OBL) a few hundred miles away from you. In the time it takes one to drive to work, it seems ten long years of hunting have come to fruition. If such news is not enough to put the nitrous into your daily fuel mix then nothing will, for when the world’s most wanted man is caught hiding in one of Pakistan’s urban areas, one knows this will be a less ordinary start to the work week.
It seems karma has a way of working things out when you decide to follow a path of aggression and terror in the name of Islam and OBL certainly had his dues to pay. A man singularly responsible for the rise of Al-Qaeda may be hated more so not only for the grief he caused in his life, but overshadowing the royal wedding of William and Kate in his death. While the latter may be acceptable as a wedding present, his reign of terror has finally gotten him a well-deserved hole in the head. But how should one feel when something like this happens? Elated, relieved, or just plain thankful? Try nervous.
Allow one to vent a grievance over how all this played out. While nobody expected live courtroom trials or memoirs of a thug life by OBL to ever make it to the international bestseller list, it would have been good to see footage of the final moments in the hideout. Had one the opportunity to deal the deathblow to OBL, a slower – and more public – passing would have been far more utilitarian.
In gauging the reaction of the nation, it is important first to ask whether it is morally wrong to rejoice in his death. Unless you have been inside a cryogenic freezer in Svalbard for the past decade or so, it isn’t and that is the most important lesson following the operation in Abbottabad. After spreading terror all across the world, OBL and the Al-Qaeda will find neither safe haven nor pity, even in a country as whimsical as Pakistan.
Anyone looking for closure after the death would be wise not to break out the bubbly just yet for this is not the end of the problem, but the beginning of a new phase in the war against terror. OBL was a figurehead for an organisation which has started to spread its tentacles all over Pakistan and nothing prevents retaliation from Al-Qaeda after this incident. But this raises the question of how effective we can expect our national security to be if the most wanted terrorist in the world has a timeshare in undetected luxury within a stone’s throw of sensitive military facilities and a hop skip and jump away from the Federal Capital? Somehow it seems our government has been a wee bit lax.
OBL never spoke for the majority of Pakistanis, and we never spoke for him and his kind either. So perhaps the time has come to stop relying on government intelligence (two words combined that can’t make sense) to let us know the next time threats to our security are festering right under our noses. As long as society alone is paying the price of terrorism with the blood of innocents, it is our responsibility to protect ourselves from future attacks.
The only way to build on this success and to fully secure our country is to develop a community watch program in urban and rural areas to prevent terrorists from getting too comfortable. This must be borne out of a civil initiative and will only prosper if it remains grass-roots oriented. There’s no point getting the government involved as they would sooner set up a committee or authority to run a good idea into the ground. In a new braver Pakistan, nothing short of social mobilization for constant vigilance will do and the exercise of due caution will show similar successes in the struggle to make our world a safer place. Now that OBL is swimming with the fish, it is our duty to take up arms against the sea of troubles swelling around us. And so the struggle continues.
The writer is a consultant on public policy.