There won’t be peace the way it was before
With the rise of Osama bin Laden to international prominence for all the wrong reasons, the world of international politics was introduced to a new concept: human deterrence. Bin Laden was the man who had millions of bounty on his head and whose demise meant the whole kit and caboodle to the world, and everything to the United States of America. The phrase ‘War on Terror’ was coined for him, where terror referred to Al-Qaeda – a strong terrorist organisation headed by the man himself. A frenzied world was beheld after 9/11. The only way this chaos could be ended, according to America, was by getting rid of the man at the helm of the organisation’s wide-ranging and radical inhuman activities.
Bin Laden was a member of a prominent, well educated family. The spark of his personality ignited a new fire of Islamism which was closer to Islamic extremism. This extremism was well-thought-out as a seed that was planted by bin Laden, and for this reason he was and had to be the most wanted man. His planning had killed around three thousand US citizens in one of the most dreadful incidents: 9/11. A week after the September 11 attacks, President George W Bush signed Public Law 107-40, in which Congress authorised the President to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organisations, or persons he determined planned, authorised, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. And none fit that description better than Osama bin Laden.
In a controversial military operation by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan, bin Laden was killed. This was hailed as an extraordinary feat by the US, and Barack Obama, in an historic address to the nation, announced his death. But was the much awaited peace gained?
It’s been three years and the world is yet to witness the actualisation of the peace project that America took up post-9/11. In retrospect, one realises that it was a magnificent illusion created to distract the world from the gaping loopholes in the US strategy that was bound to end in failure. The foundation that bin Laden had laid was so strong that it remains far from crippled. There is very little evidence that Al-Qaeda is near decline. Bin Laden’s strategic ingenuity definitely outweighed that of America.
But where did America go wrong? Fighting for peace was important and always will be. But, then, why is there no peace? The answer to this isn’t a scientific notion that can be easily understood. Strong insurgent forces have paved their way up to prominence. In its war against terrorism, the US just focused on terrorist groups that were a threat to peace. It unheeded the fact that the roots of these groups lie in poor governance.
People are suffering from hunger and poverty and they lack basic requirements for ensuring a healthy survival. Terrorism provides a shoulder in that struggle of survival. Poor governance fosters mass anger, which groups like al-Qaeda can capitalise on. These insurgent forces are social parasites that breed on instability and chaos. Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan are obvious examples to that effect. These were political issues wrongly handled militarily. It is corruption in political offices, absence of representative governments and a general ineptitude in fulfilling policy goals that breeds grievances. America itself cannot eradicate these forces since every militant’s death is paired with the rise of two. It needs to support the formation and sustenance of strong, representative governments.
Syria is a case in point. If the government in Syria had been strong there wouldn’t have been a chance of the IS getting powerful. IS is a better, stronger, wealthier and far more modernised group than Al-Qaeda. Its birth is the result of US failure. The only thing bin Laden’s death did was to give an objective lesson to the militant forces on how to survive without a figurehead.
Rigidity in policies is a characteristic of great powers, a characteristic that has often led to their demise and disintegration. Terrorist groups, today, have gone past the struggle for mere survival. They are fighting for their ideologies and image now. A fight, they are convinced, that is bound to continue in spite of any number of deaths and any range of damage that the US or any other force may be capable of inflicting upon them.
The fear is in the air that eventually there will be no ‘post-bin Laden era’ in the sense that the US wants it to be. The irony is that even if there is one, it is characterised by even more brutal and bloody incidents than the bin Laden era itself. The US has not faced complete failure but it has not gained complete success either. For it to achieve that, attention will have to be vouchsafed to the root causes and the origins of these insurgent forces. That is the greatest, if not the only, hope in which lies the salvation of all those who are fighting this scourge.
