Whenever I’m in a quandry about world events, particularly in the Middle East, I turn to Professor Juan Cole who is unparalleled in his expertise on the region. We are presenting this column from his blog Informed Comment in two parts on the rise and fall of Usama Bin Laden, what his death means and its subsequent impact on Al-Qaeda. These days especially, as the world rapidly changes, we should take to heart that adage about forgetting history. We cannot let mistakes of the past darken the potential of the future. —fb
By Juan Cole
An American president, himself the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, has taken down notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden. Despite being a Christian, Obama, it seems to me, had a personal stake in destroying someone who had defamed the religion of his birth father and his relatives.
His 2007-2008 presidential campaign was in part about the need of the US to refocus on the threat from al-Qaeda. He said that the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball by running off to Iraq to pursue an illegal war and neglecting the eastern front, from which the US had been attacked, and where riposting was legitimate in international law.
Obama began threatening to act unilaterally against al-Qaeda in Pakistan in August 2007, during the early period of the Democratic primary. Ironically, Obama had to admit that Pakistani intelligence helped the US develop the lead that allowed the US to close in on Bin Laden. So the operation was not unilateral, and young candidate Obama was too over-confident.
The US story that the Pakistanis were not given prior notice of the operation is contradicted by the Pakistani news channel Geo, which says that Pakistani troops and plainsclothesmen helped cordon off the compound in Abbottabad. CNN is pointing out that US helicopters could not have flown so far into Pakistan from Afghanistan without tripping Pakistani radar.