Young Muslim activists have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path.
Memogate reveals that Pakistan’s politics is as dysfunctional as ever. American policymakers and pundits have become so vehement about Pakistan’s failure to cooperate on counterterrorism that more pressing problems in the country have been overlooked.
The Arab Spring’s impact on the Global Jihad Movement is ironic. Al Qaeda, its associated groups and home-grown cells are no longer the agents of change. In the eyes of the people, this most powerful grouping of violent entities remains marginalized.
Throughout the last decade, news photography has re-presented the ‘war on terror’, in the form of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, in ways consistent with military strategy. Much photojournalism exists within and reproduces an ‘eternal present’, obscuring the frames that narrow its perspective, rendering casualties and context as absent.
On both ‘sides’ of the war on terror, unrealistic assessments of the possible combined with controversially broad and value-laden conceptions of ‘self-defence’ look a lot like ideological warfare.
Bin Laden was a cutting-edge public figure of the 21st century, a world citizen of our age, a militant who happened to think, with some justification, that the USA has militarily become much too big for its boots. And that’s why, figuratively speaking, his assassination is an attempted assassination of our inner democratic spirit.
Al-Qaeda is knocked down for now, and may be grovelling in the dust for the present, relying on the deployment of children as suicide bombers. But there’s no room to dismiss the existence of the drive to pursue the campaign of jihad altogether, because the thirst to pursue a hegemonic campaign of jihad is nowhere near its end.
Effective political and legal institutions; economic stimulation; and a fully functioning and strong army and police force are goals that for the most part can only be realised once conflict has subsided; which in turn requires a political solution. However, the groundwork for this has to be prepared while the Coalition forces are still in Afghanistan.
The death of Osama bin Laden is far more important for the United States than it is for Islamic terrorism. While the shooting of Al Qaeda’s leader will certainly damage the morale of would-be jihadists around the world, the most significant impact will be at home.
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