Three Takes on Bin Laden

As the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death recedes, the debate as to his role in al-Qa'ida a decade after 9/11 continues, stoked by the recent declassification of seventeen of the files removed by Navy SEALs from his compound in Abbottabad.  Three interesting analyses of these documents and what they mean to the War on Terror are provided by Bruce Hoffman in the Wall Street Journal, Patrick Cockburn in The Independent (UK), and Fawaz Gerges in The Daily Beast.

Hoffman argues that the released documents provide a corrective to the "extravagant and incorrect claims about the weakness of al Qaeda and the irrelevance of its founding leader."  Instead, he argues that "the picture that emerges from the seized Arabic-language documents is of a leader involved in both al Qaeda's day-to-day operations and long-term strategy," and that bin Laden "remained both determined and able to communicate his wishes to al Qaeda's growing stable of associates."  Okay, but any crazy derelict on a DC street corner is "determined and able to communicate his wishes" to passers-by, the question is whether anybody is actually listening.  Hoffman himself admits that the al-Qa'ida affiliates were "unresponsive," but rather cavalierly dismisses this as "a problem familiar to any manager coping with rapid expansion." 

Hoffman does make an interesting point when he cites an August 27, 2010 communique in which bin Laden expresses concern for the safety of his followers in Pakistan not because of potential military action, but because of the massive flooding that summer.  Hoffman concludes that "this assertion alone speaks volumes about how comfortable he and his minions found their refuge there."  Hmm . . . . maybe.  But there are dozens of other reports of al-Qa'ida leaders urging their fighters to seek other sanctuaries in Yemen, Somalia, or even Iran because of the drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas, not to mention the arrest of numerous al-Qa'ida senior leaders in Pakistan (i.e. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad).  Hoffman could be right in this interpretation, but given that only seventeen out of thousands of documents have been released, how do we know that this one is in any way a representative sample, a fact that Hoffman himself bemoans later in calling for a full release of the Abbottabad files?

In other words, Hoffman tends to undermine his own assertions quite a bit here.

Patrick Cockburn takes an almost diametrically opposed interpretation as Hoffman, writing:

Immediately after the killing, administration officials portrayed Bin Laden as a spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web, the well-hidden but operationally active commander in chief of al-Qa'ida.  They later retreated from these claims that were obviously at odds with his demonstrably limited contacts with the world outside his compound in Abbottabad.

He concludes that "a striking feature of these letters is that there is no evidence that their recipients made any effort to carry out their leader's instructions," and proceeds to weave a fascinating tale of how bin Laden was marginalized by al-Qa'ida after 2003, when the terror network's leaders "decided to keep the Saudi as a titular leader but quietly remove him from all operational control."

Cockburn's account and analysis certainly seem intuitively plausible.  My only caveat is that his main source for the scoop (via the investigative website Truthout) is a retired Pakistani general.  Again, it is plausible that Shaukat Qadir is correct in his details about bin Laden's isolation, but this assertion comes just after Cockburn's caution that we can't take anything Pakistan's ISI says at face value.  (Yes Qadir is retired, but the narrative that everything the Obama administration has said about Abbottabad is a lie veers to close to conspiracy theory for my tastes).

Finally, Fawaz Gerges argues that "even more than the killing of bin Laden, the Arab uprisings . . . have not only shaken the very foundation of the regional authoritarian order but unraveled the standard terrorism narrative."  Whereas al-Qa'ida's leadership decries democracy, preaching that only violent terrorism will bring about political change, "The millions of Arabs who took to the streets openly have shown that politics matters and that peaceful protests are more effective at delivering change.  The ballot box and parliamentarianism, not the sword and the caliphate, are their rallying cry, an utter rejection of what al Qaeda stands for." 

I think Gerges is right, broadly speaking, that al-Qa'ida's "core ideology is intrinsically incompatible with the universal aspirations of the Arabs."  Yet whereas the instability created by Arab Spring will not lead to al-Qa'ida taking over countries in the Middle East, I think Gerges understates the near-term risks of the Arab autocracies' security apparatuses crumbling, thereby creating space for local Salafist terrorist groups to operate.  Additionally, I think he is too quick to dismiss the Khomeini analogy.  The Iranian Revolution is much closer to the historical norm of a first wave being surpassed by more zealous ideologues in later stages.  Consequently, if the newly elected, moderately Islamic parties are unable to resolve the deep systemic problems that helped to trigger the Arab Spring in the first place, there is a significant danger that the frustrated populations will be susceptible to more extremist voices.