The celebrations that broke out in New York and Washington caught me by surprise. Yes, Osama bin Laden was dead, at long last. But this wasn’t V-E Day.
The wars hadn’t ended. The risk of terror hadn’t ended. Nothing was over, except for bin Laden’s poisonous life.
And while that is significant and important — while al-Qaeda is left headless — his death doesn’t settle anything.
And yet I understood the inclination. It is nearly 10 years since 9/11, and nothing we have done, none of the wars we have fought, none of the lives and treasure that have been lost, none of it has brought any real satisfaction.
Though Barack Obama talked of justice in his late-night speech Sunday, the real issue, as many have suggested, was vengeance. That it came in a bold and risky stroke, and not from a missile-launching drone, seemed only to confirm the point.
But if the celebrations seemed somehow off-key — as they did to me — it may be because it has been years since bin Laden has been at the center of anything. He was a villain, but a villain in hiding, out of view and, for the most part, out of mind.
You have to remember that for years the Bush administration, frustrated in its inability to find him, would not even mention his name, as if that meant he no longer mattered.
But the irony — and not a small one — is that the world, bin Laden’s world, was suddenly passing him by even as the Navy SEALs were closing in.
In fact, the long-awaited death of bin Laden may prove to be less important than the slow death of bin Ladenism.
The story in the Arab world is, of course, of the Arab Spring. And the Arab Spring is as much a rejection of bin Laden’s brand of terror as it is the embrace of something new and different, which we all hope is something like democracy.
When the pro-democracy demonstrators were marching in Tahrir Square, they weren’t calling for death to America. It wasn’t about America. It wasn’t about Israel. It wasn’t about Iran. It wasn’t about the Muslim Brotherhood. It was about the long years of government oppression and neglect. The narrative that had been written in that part of the world dramatically changed.
When bin Laden became a force in the Muslim world, the only choices available to many people were the despots who rule them and the radical Islamists who opposed the despots who ruled them. What began in Tunisia was a different choice.
Bin Laden’s world had clearly begun to shrink, and so had the world of al-Qaeda. This is not surprising. As Obama pointed out in his speech, Muslims have been prime al-Qaeda victims. At the 7/7 bombings in London, one of the targeted trains was in a Muslim neighborhood, a warning against those who might embrace the West. As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker, in the post- 9/11 world, the likely victims of al-Qaeda terror have been Jordanian wedding parties and Pakistani police cadets.
This isn’t to say that al-Qaeda and its allies have lost their power to terrorize. They obviously haven’t. Your next trip through the airport won’t be any better than your last one.
But things are changing. Bin Laden’s death will certainly play out in American political terms. We can expect Obama’s poll numbers to rise. Meanwhile, as if on cue, the “deathers” have arrived, meaning we’ll soon see the inevitable release of photos of bin Laden’s corpse. Donald Trump will certainly find something outrageous to say.
But this is also an opportunity for us to ask again why we’re still fighting in Afghanistan and if there isn’t a different way to fight the remaining terrorists. If there’s anything we’ve learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s how difficult it is to figure out a way to define victory, much less win it.
The death of bin Laden has to be one way. This was a daring military victory and certainly a moral victory.
What’s left in Afghanistan is basically a contest between the evil Taliban and a corrupt Afghan government. I don’t know how anyone finds an endgame there or, for that matter, the need for more than 100,000 U.S. troops. We didn’t need 100,000 troops to kill bin Laden.
When we first began the war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said there wouldn’t be a traditional end to what was a fight against a different kind of enemy. There would be no surrender on a ship, no sword at Appomattox. He was right. But it is nearly 10 years now, and people want a reason to celebrate.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
