by Rebecca Zimmerman
Osama bin Laden is dead, and it makes me want to cry. Puzzle that one out, if you will. Bin Laden has dogged my professional life since 1998. On September 12, 2001 I was asleep on a bus in rural Nepal when a rap on my window woke me in time to hear, "your World Trade Towers, they are gone!" I scribbled in my journal all the way back to Kathmandu; even without details I wrote that I knew it must be Osama bin Laden. Today, Afghanistan is my life. After two extended field research trips embedded with the military and working with Afghans, I've returned home to write my dissertation on the U.S. military's experience there. By rights, I should have been among those who gathered by the White House in joyful celebration. But as I examine the reasons much of America is celebrating I cannot find justification for such brash, self-congratulatory cheer. And I am not alone, those friends of mine who have shouldered the greatest burdens of the last decade are somber and qualified in their reactions.
To view Osama bin Laden as the gravitational center of global Islamist terrorism is to see the world as it was a decade ago. Terrorism and (mercifully) counterterrorism have evolved profoundly since then. As the pundits have already remarked, any tangible effect is likely to be negative, in the form of hasty reprisals from Islamist affinity groups. If this was the point of all this war, I'd rather have just kept my friends alive and let Osama die a forgotten old man, thank you very much. Of course his death wasn't ever the sole point. But even by those who understand that Osama bin Laden's death has little intrinsic value, I am told we should celebrate the symbolic victory of this moment.
As a civilian among the military, I often find myself caught between two visions of this war. The war as many Americans see it is a titanic, ideological clash through which the innocent can be liberated from fanaticism. In this war we have given evil a face, and with its destruction feel thrillingly victorious. But the real war isn't like that at all. The real war is one where you find out the district subgovernor you've been backing for six months is a murderer. It is one where the rich and powerful play us off against our enemies for profit and power. It is confusing, it is hard, and it is increasingly misunderstood and maligned by the American people. In this war evil has no face, and there will never be a golden moment when we can call it vanquished.
Today I am deflated. I fear that this false summit, this pretend victory in an imagined war, will sap America's resolve for the real, confusing war that continues. I am thinking about the Afghans I know who have endured much and will fear what they will assume is a reinvigorated schedule for U.S. military withdrawal. And I am thinking about my deployed friends, alone and unafraid, trying to do right amid a vast array of bad choices. We haven't even figured out how to win the real war yet, if we follow our fantasies perhaps we never will.
Last summer, in the darkest night imaginable, I stood at a fallen comrade ceremony in Helmand. The formation broke and five Marines walked briskly to the edge of the tarmac, picked up their rucks and strapped on their helmets. In silence they walked to a waiting helicopter and flew back to the fight. At home many are cheering, but all I can see are the thousands who, as we celebrate, are shouldering their packs and heading out, back into the real war.
Rebecca Zimmerman is a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project. She has extensive field research experience in Afghanistan and the southern Philippines.
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Strongly disagree with her comments that killing UBL was not a victory, it surely was, but as we all understand it is not the end of this conflict.
I think she confuses the topic when she writes, "But the real war isnt like that at all. The real war is one where you find out the district subgovernor youve been backing for six months is a murderer." What she calls the real war, is actually what Bing West calls the wrong war (correctly IMO). The right war involves killing UBL and his cohorts, and what we're doing in Afghanistan is not directly related to that, they are two separate wars. If you're from the school that "we" have to stabilize Afghanistan to defeat AQ (I'm not), then I think she is right in her implication that the killing of UBL is largely irrelevant to that fight. On the first read I missed her comment that she would rather see UBL die an old man than lose some of her friends. That comment is out of left lane and based entirely on emotion. UBL is responsible for killing over 3,000 Americans (that is a lot of friends), and allowing him to die in peace of old age is completely unacceptable. That fact that he was killed by American operator that he saw before he died is justice and a victory in the fight against AQ. Looking forward to hearing about more victories in the future.
A "pretend victory" she said, WTH??
It was a good kill, a good kill and we in the US military and Americans overall should be happy and rejoicing that American elite fighting men have killed terrorist enemy number one.
And even though I am not a US marine but a US Army armor officer, I betya that marines in Afghanistan were high fiving the fact that the loser OBL had been whacked in a solid op that accomplished its purpose.
let's not overthink things here.
gian
For the life of me, I can't see how this unserious trifle got published by SWJ.
But since it was published, the readers also deserved to know how Ms Zimmerman gets paid when she's not hanging around Marines long enough to know what they call their packs.
According to Caerus Associates, she might be on staff with them. Part of putting into context any scholar's words is the motivation behind them, including that which is financial.
http://www.caerusassociates.com/Caerus_Associates/-_files/Company%20Sna…
If so, that should be disclosed.
Possibly the only way that the death of UBL will change things is:
a. If it causes the United States to reconsider its role in the world (that of being the world/the globe's "leader") and
b. If it causes the United States to give up the idea that this "leadership" role requires that the United States act so as to "fix" the world's problems.
Herein, the United States attributes much of the world's problems today to "outlier" states and societies (those whose political, economic and societal orientation is not sufficiently like ours).
Thus, in its perceived role as the world's leader, the United States feels that it is our responsibility to correct these deficiencies.
And it would seem that the death of OBL would have no corrective effect on changing this perception.
In fact, it (OBL's death at our hands) might well reinforce our belief as to our role (global leader), the problem (outlier states and societies), our responsibility (to fix the problem) and our ability to do so.
While I don't agree that we shouldn't celebrate UBL's death at the hands of the U.S. military operators instead of what would be perceived as a cowardly missile strike, I think Rebecca made some good points.
Whether killing UBL will have a strategic impact on the WOT is still unknown, but I think it has the potential to be much more than a tactical success. For example, it may change the nature of our relationship with Pakistan (for better or worse). Showing pictures of UBL with his brians blown out may destroy the more common image of him as a wise leader of the global Islamist movement, or it may result in a huge backlash from the Muslim world. The bottom line is we don't know yet, and try as we will to control and shape the message it is largely out of our sphere of control.
She is clearly right when she mentions
that the character of the war has changed (both the Islamist strategy and our response to it), so this isn't the same fight we were in during 2002 and UBL is less relevant (but far from irrelevant). In many ways the terrorists are more capable, and we're definitely more capable in many respects. That is what one expects when both sides are evolving in response to each other over years of conflict.
Rebecca wrote,
"" In this war we have given evil a face, and with its destruction feel thrillingly victorious. But the real war isnt like that at all. The real war is one where you find out the district subgovernor youve been backing for six months is a murderer. It is one where the rich and powerful play us off against our enemies for profit and power. It is confusing, it is hard, and it is increasingly misunderstood and maligned by the American people. In this war evil has no face, and there will never be a golden moment when we can call it vanquished.""
This paragraph is very well written and powerful. In my view it challenges our current strategy of global COIN where we invest the blood of our children and our nation's wealth in an effort to reform the world (with little to show for it). However, the efforts of our intelligence services and special operations forces have repeatedly disrupted attacks at a fraction of the cost. I don't want to resurface the CT versus COIN debate, since it is false debate to begin with, but I do think realism should trump idealism as we continue to fight this conflict for the forseeable future.
Nowhere in this piece does it minimalize "the performance of those who went in to Pakistan" or "the heroic performance of said operators."
And you have to be joking to compare the theater of Sunday night/Monday morning to the "to the unity that this country once exemplified after 9/11."
That unity after 9/11 wasn't forced or contrived as was the other night. If I was conspiracy theorist, Id say I seen better performances in many third world countrys capital squares, but Im just chalking this up to a generation (20-30 year olds) looking for their moment to say, "I was there that night." OBTW, they didnt have anything else to do, they cant find jobs in todays economy, which is the real threat we better start focusing on.
The unity after 9/11 was based in uncertainty, anger, and knowledge that we are in a fight and we better stick together. That feeling has long since faded unfortunately, but 350+ million people can't be expected to stay on point for long. I am hoping it's our resiliency to bounce back that lets us go back to our old selves and not our lack of concern of events around us.
This raid was a symbolic victory, that's it. Nothing has changed in the world of terrorism, except maybe a bump up of some planning cycles in either fear that they are next, or out of the use of "revenge attack" as a way of garnering the world press' attention.
I'd compare these last few years of UBL's life and the amount of influence he still yielded to that of an ex-president.
He's dead. Good deal, great job by all involved. Now let's get back to business.
Let's get back to fixing those things that are broke; Economy, Foreign policy, Trade deficit, etc. Things that can really effect and unite the average citizen.
I agree that this war lacks an effective strategy or goal, but to say the killing of UBL is not an advantageous achievement, or to minimize the degree of success such an event brings let alone the performance of those who went in to Pakistan, is to take away from the unity that this country once exemplified after 9/11 and the heroic performance of said operators. No, UBL is not the face of war as terrorism has many heads, but he certainly was a profound face of terrorism that offers a symbolic victory for the US, as denoted through the statement of symbolic inference, "the rich and powerful play us off against our enemies for profit and power."