Death of Osama bin Laden: Two Comments and One News Story
-- I/III.
Islam after Osama
Behind the ugly reality there's poetic justice. Osama bin Laden was finally bearded in the world's most happening terror den: Pakistan. Osama is no more but who does not know that the cult of violence that he practised and preached in Islam's name is alive and kicking in Pakistan like nowhere else. This column, however, is about Osama's unintended gift to post-9/11 Islam.
Step back just a decade and you'd think that Muslims engaged with the paradigm of "Islam and Modernity" were few and far between. The dominant voices in the world of 20th century Islam, especially the latter half, were those of Syed Abu Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in the subcontinent; Syed Qutb, leading theologian of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who gave birth to Wahhabism, the rigid, intolerant Islam of Saudi Arabia.
Born and bred as a devout Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia, it was easy for Osama to embrace the shared belief of Maududi and Qutb that all man-made ideas and systems — pan-Arabism, democracy, socialism, communism — were bankrupt; that only Shariah law ruthlessly enforced by an Islamic state could restore divine order in the world. Thanks to an intermix of Wahhabism, Qutbism and Maududiat, what would otherwise have been an Afghan national liberation movement against the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s turned into a laboratory of violent, global jihad. Osama was the most lethal product of this cross-fertilisation. And then there was 9/11, al-Qaeda's own welcome message to the 21st century and the new millennium.
Call it Hegelian dialectics: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Some among Muslims rejoiced over this "humiliation" of the only global superpower (so soon after the mujahids had facilitated the demise of the rival superpower). Others insisted 9/11 was a mean CIA-Mossad conspiracy to fan Islamophobia. But saner members of the Ummah were horrified that such a monstrosity could be committed in the name of a faith that literally means peace. The poison that Osama and al-Qaeda injected into Islam found its antidote within
Islam. Thank you, Hegel.
"Islam was hijacked on 9/11," declared the American convert Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. The UK-based Ziauddin Sardar was as prompt in issuing "My fatwa on the fanatics." With such opening salvo, the last decade saw an ever growing number of Muslim voices eager not only to reclaim their faith from the extremists, but also, in the words of Sardar, to "rebuild Islam, brick-by-brick".
Though Osama has now been rendered inactive, the terror machine is yet to be dismantled, the theology of violent jihad yet to be pushed out of the marketplace of ideas. But there are reasons to nurture hope. You can today build a small personal library for yourself just with books titled Seeds of Terror, The Nuclear Jihadist, Terror in the Name of God, Sacred Rage, Talibanisation of Pakistan, Descent into Chaos and so on. But should you feel so inclined, you'll need to multiply shelf-space several times over to add books and videos infused with the spirit of New Age Islam.
A decade ago, the theologians of a tolerant, plural, gender-just, rights- and freedom-friendly, pro-democracy Islam were few in number. Today, not only is the tribe of their followers growing rapidly, but an ever-increasing number of Muslim men and women are also reading and interpreting the Quran and the Tradition of the Prophet in sync with modern sensibilities.
Sadly, we aren't yet familiar with them in India. But they are important, influential names across much of the world. The US-based Shaikh Khaled Abou El Fadl, for example, is a strong proponent of human rights, a staunch advocate of gender equality and is amongst the most critical and powerful voices against puritan and Wahhabi Islam today. Then there is Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College, Berkeley, US. Jordan's Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre places him on its list of the top 50 most influential Muslims in the world. The magazine Egypt Today described him as a kind of theological rock star, "the Elvis Presley of western Muslims".
Or, take Tariq Ramadan, the UK-based author of Radical
Reform. An online poll by Foreign Policy magazine in 2009 placed Ramadan on the 49th spot on a list of the world's top 100 contemporary intellectuals. And let's not forget Amina Wadud, Islamic feminist, imam, and author of Inside the Gender Jihad. In March 1995, she stirred up quite a storm in the Muslim world after leading a Friday prayer of over 100 male and female Muslims in New York.
In the first year of the 21st century, Osama stretched the dominant Islamic thought of the 20th century to its extreme. A decade later, there is a growing body of books, lectures and pages of the World Wide Web propounding an Islam that is at home with the modern world and vice versa. And in the last few months, such intellectuals and scholars have struck common ground with the masses on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain. Osama must have had many nightmares in his last days of hiding.
The writer is general secretary of Muslims for Secular Democracy
II.
http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20110504_8071.php
U.S. to Move Against Al-Qaeda's Central Command
Wednesday, May 4, 2011The United States will seek to capitalize on the recent killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by eliminating the terrorist network's core command, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said on Tuesday (see GSN, May 3).
Following the September 11 assaults that killed close to 3,000 people in the United States, al-Qaeda offshoots have proliferated in Africa and the Middle East, Reuters reported. Residents of Europe and the United States have also become radicalized and carried out strikes in their home nations.
The Sunday shooting death of bin Laden by elite U.S. Navy SEALS is the most recent of several U.S. "severe body blows" to al-Qaeda's main organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan within the last year, Brennan said in an interview with NBC's Today show.
"We're going to try to take advantage of this opportunity we have now with the death of al-Qaeda's leader, bin Laden, to ensure that we're able to destroy that organization," said. "We're determined to do so and we believe we can."
"We believe that we have damaged the organization, degraded its capability and made it much more difficult for it to operate inside of Pakistan as well as beyond," Brennan said.
On Monday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) told MSNBC that U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal region had eliminated up to 17 high-ranking al-Qaeda commanders prior to bin Laden's demise.
Security officials and foreign leaders have called for heightened security and monitoring following the terrorist leader's death as al-Qaeda adherents might seek to mount revenge attacks. Brennan, however, said U.S. officials had received no intelligence regarding any particular plot since Sunday.
"But what we're doing is, we're taking all those prudent measures that we need to whenever there's an incident of significance like this," Brennan told ABC's "Good Morning America."
"Right now, I think we feel pretty confident that we are at the right posture" (David Morgan, Reuters I, May 3).
On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. people and police forces could not let down their guards, Reuters reported.
"We cannot become complacent, the fight is far from over," Holder said at a Capitol Hill hearing. "Just yesterday I ordered the (Justice) Department's prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to be mindful that bin Laden's death could result in retaliatory acts in the United States or against our interests overseas," Holder said (Pelofsky/Vicini,Reuters II, May 3).
Cities across the United States have bolstered their defenses in response to worries about terrorist revenge attacks, the Christian Science Monitor reported on Tuesday.
A specialized Marine biological and chemical agent defense unit has been called back from Japan, where it was supporting efforts to manage the crisis at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (see related GSN story, today).
The Homeland Security Department, however, has not heightened the terrorist threat alert, saying it would only do so if there is detailed or clearly valid intelligence about an attack plan (see GSN, April 21).
Some terrorism analysts said it was highly likely that Muslim extremists would seek to mount a retaliatory strike.
"Revenge is very important to them," Potomac Institute Islamic radicalism expert Tawfik Hamid said. "It is part of the mental process, part of the culture."
Hamid said he anticipates that any revenge assault would happen in the next two to three months.
Those extremists with attack plans already in the works will seek to ratchet up their execution, George Washington University terrorism expert Frank Cilluffo said.
"Yes, there is an immediate window," the director of the university's Homeland Security Policy Institute said. "But you cannot assume, if there is a window, they intend to strike (at that moment)."
Al-Qaeda today has ties to between 30 and 40 extremist organizations, University of Maryland terrorism expert Gary LaFree said. "It's more like a franchise. And they are not going away."
The terrorist network has had a role in 16 of the 25 terrorist strikes that caused 25 deaths or more since 1998, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
Bin Laden years before his death had prioritized acquiring weapons of mass destruction for use in a terrorist attack, which makes the decision to recall the Marine chem/bio response team a wise one, said LaFree, who leads the consortium.
"It is sensible to be vigilant in all areas," LaFree said. "It would be crazy to rule out a ... chemical or biological attack (Ron Scherer,Christian Science Monitor, May 3).
The United States does not believe that al-Qaeda has succeeded in obtaining a workable nuclear device or in weaponizing lethal pathogens or chemical agents.
U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Pamela Quanrud on Tuesday said Europe need not be worried about a reported threat made before bin Laden's death that al-Qaeda would respond to precisely that situation with a retaliatory nuclear attack in Europe. The threat was cited in a document made public by the antisecrets group WikiLeaks, the Xinhua News Agency reported (see GSN, April 26; Xinhua News Agency/China Daily, May 3).
Securing all nuclear materials has become even more necessary with the death of bin Laden, U.S. nonproliferation analyst William Tobey told the Korea Times.
The Harvard University Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs senior fellow called on foreign governments to use the 2012 Global Nuclear Security Summit in South Korea to devise new safeguards for protecting nuclear stocks around the world (see GSN, May 3).
Tobey, though, minimized the potential for al-Qaeda to mount a nuclear revenge attack.
"We know that al-Qaeda has long sought to conduct acts of nuclear terrorism, but so far, has proven unsuccessful," the former U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration deputy administrator said. "The key, of course, is to preventing them from gaining access to fissile material."
"Specific actions that the governments [at the summit] could undertake would include setting a date to end the use of highly enriched uranium in civil applications, mandating stronger regulatory oversight of security and adopting strong minimum standards for securing fissile material," Tobey said (Kang Hyun-kyung, Korea Times, May 3).
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon on Tuesday said his government would enhance safeguards inside and outside of the country to deter the likelihood of a successful retaliatory terrorist attack, Reuters reported.
Defenses surrounding French embassies, French firms and international schools located in nations beset by conflict would be enhanced, Fillon said (Vinocur/Pineau, Reuters III, May 3).
Meanwhile, Washington on Tuesday pledged to find out if Pakistan had aided bin Laden's effort in evading the United States' massive and years-long search for the al-Qaeda chief, Reuters reported.
An extended U.S. intelligence operation in Pakistan determined that bin Laden was probably hiding in a secured compound in the town of Abbottabad, not far from the capital of Islamabad. The Sunday commando raid confirmed the U.S. suspicions and raised doubts over the utility of the strategic alliance with Pakistan.
The Obama administration did not alert Islamabad before the raid out of concern that Pakistani officials would "alert the targets" and enable bin Laden to once again escape, CIA chief Leon Panetta said in an interview with Time magazine.
"It would be premature to rule out the possibility that there were some individuals inside of Pakistan, including within the official Pakistani establishment, who might have been aware of [bin Laden's true whereabouts]," Brennan said to National Public Radio. "We're not accusing anybody at this point but we want to make sure we get to the bottom of this."
Some Capitol Hill lawmakers have called for reassessment of continued aid to Islamabad, which since September 2001 has received $20 billion in U.S. military and economic assistance. Questions have been raised over whether the Pakistani government and security establishment were incompetent or duplicitous in their insistence they did not know where bin Laden could be found.
There are widespread suspicions that Islamabad has been playing both sides -- the United States which is a source of financial support and militants who provide a tool for Pakistan's interests in neighboring Afghanistan and against rival India (Haider/Spetalnick, Reuters IV, May 3).
Brennan told NPR, "They (Pakistani officials) are expressing as great a surprise as we had when we first learned about this compound, so there is no indication at this point that the people we have talked to were aware of this, but we need to dig deeper into this," Reuters reported.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari insisted on Tuesday in a commentary carried by the Washington Post that the al-Qaeda leader "was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be." He did not address questions about why the Pakistani army and intelligence service failed to realize that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad -- a town with a heavy military presence (Reuters V, May 3).
British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday echoed U.S. skepticism and said there was no way that bin Laden did not have a system of supporters helping him in Pakistan, Reuters reported.
"We don't currently know the extent of that network, so it is right that we ask searching questions about it. And we will," Cameron promised British lawmakers (Tim Castle, Reuters VI, May 3).
The Other Nuclear Crisis
NEW DELHI -- Thirty-one years ago this spring, the world was riveted by a tale of nuclear terrorism called The Fifth Horseman. In this best-selling novel, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatens to explode a three-megaton nuclear bomb hidden under New York City, unless an autonomous Palestinian state is immediately established. The book was so disturbing that French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing cancelled the sale of nuclear reactors to Libya, even though they were allegedly intended for peaceful purposes.
Today, a real-life twist on The Fifth Horseman is playing out in an unstable, autonomous nation with the world's second-largest Muslim population, which incubated the global jihadist movement that led to the terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001: Pakistan. In this case, rather than France working to deny reactors, China is actively working to supply them.
With the remarkable news of Osama bin Laden's death likely to inflame jihadist anger -- a week after Pakistan's successful test-fire last week of a new, short-range, surface-to-surface ballistic missile that a military press release announced "carries nuclear weapons" -- the feeling among leaders here is that the risk of a real-life doomsday scenario is one the global community can no longer ignore.
"If Pakistan loses control of the jihadist elements within its own country, al Qaeda will work to target a nuclear weapon at an American or European city," K.C. Singh, the former director of the Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism between India and Pakistan, said to me. This is a particular problem in a country, as U.S. Ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer says, where "young people are demonstrating for extremism, not democracy."
Nuclear weapons have long played a deterrent role here, as they did between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. India, routed by China in 1962, realized it couldn't defeat The Middle Kingdom in a conventional war, so it launched a nuclear program in 1967 as a deterrent. Pakistan, routed by India in four wars since 1947, realized the same about India, and launched its program in 1972. The threat of mutually assured destruction has kept each nation-state in check since.
But Pakistan has gone on a building binge in recent years, growing its arsenal from about 70 weapons in 2008 to 100 or more today. Exact numbers are unknown because Pakistan is not a signatory to treaties that would allow inspection by regulatory agencies. Furthermore, the Pakistani army -- which controls the nuclear program -- takes a secretive and paranoid approach to its stockpile, deliberately concealing information about the location of its weapons.
As the U.S. struck a nuclear agreement with India in 2008 allowing India to trade in nuclear materials, technologies and equipment, China sided with Pakistan, promising Pakistan two more nuclear reactors, allowing Pakistan to build an additional 24 weapons a year. On March 14, just two days after Japan's earthquake and subsequent Fukushima meltdown, Chinese engineers in Pakistan successfully linked one of the new reactors to a power grid. As a result, Pakistan will soon have the world's fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. With last week's test of the new Nasr missile -- which establishes, as Defense News put it, that tactical nuclear weapons will be deployed close to the Indian border -- the nation with more active terrorists than any other has infinite more opportunities for nuclear devices to fall into the hands of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or any other jihadist group. The death of bin Laden only accentuates the danger.
What's most terrifying is that the specter of mutually assured destruction that has long kept this region in balance doesn't apply to Pakistan's radical jihadists. Nation-states don't commit suicide; individual jihadists, on the other hand, see suicide as a path to glory. Death isn't a deterrent -- it's a reward. And if things go south in the Pakistani government -- which has been a supplier of nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya -- "Pakistan will sell nuclear secrets to al Qaeda," a high-ranking Indian official with responsibility for Pakistan tells me. Adds Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon: "I don't think people in Washington understand how big a problem it is here."
Years of regional mistrust calls out for leadership from the global community. What to do? Three things:
First, the U.S. should make clear to Pakistan that if any of these devices land in jihadist hands, or God forbid get used, Washington will hold Islamabad accountable. With Pakistan's top spy, Inter-Services Intelligence Chief General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, in D.C. last week -- reportedly telling the CIA to "get the hell out of Pakistan" -- Washington should make clear that it will see no daylight between Pakistani generals and jihadi radicals if safeguards fail.
Second, the U.S. should condition all future aid to Pakistan on weapons inspections. The U.S., which has given Pakistan nearly $20 billion in mostly military aid since 2001, should make an offer Pakistan cannot refuse: no inspections, no aid. But in return, the U.S. should pledge to assuage Pakistan's paranoia about India.
Third, the U.S. should quietly persuade India to be more flexible on Kashmir. In 2005, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's U.S. Ambassador, wrote that the disputed Kashmir region has "poisoned India-Pakistan relations" but that its settling "could pave the way for normalization between the two countries." India and Pakistan had a standing agreement in 2007, when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf directed secret "backchannel" negotiations with India before being ousted. With 2008's U.S.-India nuclear deal creating a stable relationship, the U.S. should encourage India to support the deal: demarcating the current "line of control" as the border, while allowing Kashmiris to travel and trade across all Kashmir.
Hopefully, these steps will be taken before the world's fourth-largest nuclear power becomes the Fifth Horseman of the apocalypse.
Stanley A. Weiss is Founding Chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington
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