The Death of a Symbol: Bin Laden Deposed

May 13th, 2011

Osama bin Laden dominated the decade before his demise by his absence. In death, the world got to discover that the myth had a physical envelope, now dissolving off the coast of Hadramawt. As a man, bin Laden in his last years existed only in the dirt garden within the walls of his compounds; as a symbol, he existed in the mind of most living and conscious humans. The dirt garden and his fellow inmates will miss his physical presence. Humanity will fill the void the symbol occupied in the real estate in their imagination: some will rejoice, some will cringe, most will be indifferent.

To the chagrin of Washington’s antiterrorism cottage industry, the geostrategic implication of his death will be nil. Only organizations that enjoy safe havens can afford to decide the timing of their operations. For underground outfits, hounded by security forces, operational capability is extremely hard to develop and has to be exercised as soon as it is acquired. If an underground terrorist cell is ever in a position to execute an operation, it will have do so immediately or risk losing the opportunity. There can be no waiting for a particular star alignment, or the death of a leader, or some other kind of symbolic moment.

The mighty Taliban have the luxury to choose the timing, but given their customary lack of restraint, the death of bin Laden can hardly radicalize them. A cluster of jihadists in Yemen has persistently tried over the last few years to take down airliners. The death of bin Laden will neither hinder nor facilitate their success. If anything, the commotion that followed the killing of the Saudi-born terrorist could inspire a virgin self-starter to join the fight. But by definition, a virgin comes with no operational ability, and is no great risk.

The Obama administration has tried to spin the Abbottabad operation as a strategic watershed, probably to begin a strategic reorientation of its military effort in Afghanistan. The old man making home videos was running a “command and control” center. But killing bin Laden was not about making airline travel safer, it was about something else, like sending a bunch of aviators to the moon in the era of ICBMs and winning a hockey game against the Soviet Union after the loss of the Vietnam War. It is a symbolic success, the hope that chance will turn in favor of America, that a new era is around the corner, an era of breeze-through checkpoints at the busy airports of a nation whose economy has become prosperous once again.

The meat of the story has been in the details. Where he lived, how he lived, what he ate and drink, how the folks in the compound shopped, dealt with their neighbors. Imaginations ran wild: the sparsely furnished if spacious concrete box at the heart of his compound became a luxury mansion. The story of the hunt—the spies and the Navy SEALs and the new type of radar-evading helicopters—eclipsed all geostrategic considerations, with the exception of the duplicity of the government of Pakistan. But that was an old story, as if revealing during the détente of the 1970s that Moscow was duplicitous in its dealings with Washington.

There is something pathetic about fallen villains. Hitler, impotent in his bunker, with Eva Braun for sole audience as his Reich was ravaged. The Ceausescus, whisked at dawn to a summary execution. Saddam Hussein’s bleak journey from a hole to a rope, his realm consumed by civil war. Now, bin Laden, in the intimacy his bedroom, unarmed next to his wife, a cliché of domesticity. Other, far greater monsters got lucky: Stalin and Mao died before the systems of terror they had created could unravel. But bin Laden only ruled imaginations, thanks to the global power of American media who never stopped talking about him. His death only occurred in imaginations, leaving the potato fields and eucalyptuses of Abbottabad almost unscathed.

A lesson of those deaths is the quintessential banality of monsters, people who only got to where they were because they could leverage the complicity of others. It is one thing for a recluse, shy Saudi boy with limited knowledge of the ways of the world to fantasize about destroying America. It is quite another for him to end up in a position to direct others into actually carrying out his brutal fantasies. Global jihad was not just an inevitable reaction to the kind of societal and economic pressure existent in the Muslim world in the late twentieth century—the youth bulge and the lopsided human and economic development. Other societies have been exposed to terrible pressure—for instance, China and Vietnam from World War II to the 1970s—yet they responded differently. There was violence aplenty during the Asian metamorphosis, far greater killings in numbers, but the style was different.

If violence was highly likely while the Muslim world experienced its own transformation into modernity, the style was a matter of choice. Global jihad had an imagination of its own: it developed its unique symbolism and morbid aesthetics that included crashing civilian airliners and blowing up commuter trains and, at times, beheading people. Bin Laden was not the only or even the main performer who defined the style of protest for his generation. Chechens pioneered the snuff genre, and the Taliban performed public displays of “Islamic” justice with unsurpassed gusto. But like Picasso or Warhol in his time, bin Laden made himself into the symbol of the new school. Fads pass. A few months already before his death, a powerful wave of Arab revolts had broken with the old style and presented the world with something different. New symbols now define the aesthetics of a changing Islamic world, as demonstrators chant to their tyrants, “Irhal! Irhal! Irhal!”—“Leave! Leave! Leave!”

Camille Pecastaing is a senior associate professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.