Triumph or Tumult?

The murder of Bin Laden will win Obama kudos at home, but will it
further destabilize Pakistan?

The subways were shut down in the wake of the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. The workers of Washington filled the
streets, tuned out of their office buildings, many with no way home,
moving dazedly along the pavement on a brilliant fall day against a
sonal backdrop of screaming sirens. That was 2001.

Yesterday morning, the screaming outside the White House came from a
gathering of hundreds of young people waving American flags, hooting
and hollering gleefully, in celebration of the death of Osama bin
Laden, whose demise at the hands of U.S. troops was announced very
late Sunday night by President Obama.

It's hard to overstate the symbolic victory, both for the Obama
administration, and for the American people, of the news of Bin
Laden's death. And for the family members and friends of those whose
lives were taken by the al Qaeda attacks, a sense of justice is no
doubt felt served by most. All the same, one thing that is easy to
overstate is whatever negative impact the Bin Laden killing will have
on the daily operations of the terrorist organization he founded,
which, according to national security experts, he wasn't really
running himself anymore, anyway. Meanwhile, his second-in-command,
Ayman al-Zawarhiri, remains at large.

But it's also hard to estimate the amount of blow-back the U.S. and
its allies will encounter as a result of the killing. Already there
are calls for photos of the body, of which Obama said the U.S. has
custody, to be released, an act that would likely serve as an
incitement to extremists. Those who think the killing of Bin Laden
signals an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan may want to think again,
for it's quite possible that Pakistan will be further destabilized by
Bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. forces on a compound so close
to the capital. At this point, the Afghan war is no longer about
Afghanistan, which many believe to be a lost cause; it's about the
nuclear-armed Pakistan, and maintaining a U.S. presence in a tinderbox
region that could blow up a good part of the world.

It's difficult to believe that U.S. could have gone in to the compound
in Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was found, without the acquiescence of
Pakistan's President Zardari, already a weak figure whose reputation
is unlikely to be enhanced by any role he may have had in allowing the
U.S. to conduct a military operation on his nation's soil. The U.S.
was unpopular in Pakistan long before it began launching drone attacks
on villages in the hinterlands of Waziristan, but repeated operations
that yielded civilian deaths have soured even moderate Pakistanis on
their government's rather tortured alliance with the Western
superpower. U.S. officials now claim that Pakistan was not notified
before the raid on Bin Laden's compound, though.

Yet while U.S. intelligence operatives likely located Bin Laden's
location via government insiders, the location of Bin Laden's hideout
suggests that the late al Qaeda leader had more than a little help
from inside the Pakistani intelligence community, where he had always
found a significant measure of support. There was a time, of course,
when Bin Laden also had the support of the American intelligence
community -- back when the U.S. was arming Afghan warlords and jihadis
to take on the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. Bin Laden
used his fortune as the scion of a Saudi construction magnate to
gather a force of foreign, mostly Arab, fighters to fight alongside
the Afghans and the CIA was only too happy to help Bin Laden's
fighters get the arms they needed.

Pakistan was the conduit for the supply chain of rocket launchers and
Kalashnikovs supplied by the U.S., and through its madrassahs,
sustained by both the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
operation, young men were turned into fighters. However noble the
cause of Afghans reclaiming their nation from the Soviet invaders, the
U.S. was not in it for the nobility of the cause; America was fighting
its own proxy war against the Soviets, and the devastation America's
Cold War foe endured at the hands of the Afghans surely facilitated
the Soviet Union's demise as a nation.

But after the Afghans all but won the Cold War for America, the U.S.
turned tail and left, leaving stockpiles of arms in the hands of
unscrupulous warlords. The Taliban was initially born as an antidote
to rapaciousness of the warlords, only to become its own brand of
oppression, aided and abetted by Osama Bin Laden, who, until yesterday
was more than a living, breathing symbol of extremism; he was a
living, breathing creature of the blowback to America's first
intervention in the region.

Now that he is gone, the question of blowback re-opens. While Bin
Laden's death by U.S. bullets may not operationally change the
function of al Qaeda, it changes the dynamics around the world. Barack
Obama will forever be the guy who got Bin Laden, surely a triumph for
him at home. But in the part of the world where U.S. arms have killed
children, and where U.S. history is too often a story of alliance with
dictators, the outcome is far less certain.