Was Bin Laden the Easy Part?

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What to Read on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda

Daniel Byman

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

On Sunday, Osama bin Laden met a fitting if belated demise, shot by a U.S. special forces team in an operation inside Pakistan. The killing of bin Laden was a just and necessary act that should be met with somber satisfaction but not exaltation. His death has global implications that are both subtle and complex -- and perhaps will make life more complicated for U.S. policymakers in combating the threat of global terror groups.

There is no reason to expect the Islamist terrorist threat to diminish as a result of his death. Bin Laden had long since detached himself from direct tactical control of global terrorist conspiracies conducted under the banner of al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he established in the 1990s. He was intimately involved in the planning and direction of al Qaeda’s 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack against the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and, of course, the attacks of September 11, 2001. But after the assault on his stronghold in Afghanistan and his flight into Pakistan in late 2001, it became clear to him that his survival depended on limiting his contact with the outside world to the barest minimum. Planning and direction of al Qaeda’s post-9/11 plots, such as the bombing of the London Underground in July 2005 and the 2006 plot against U.S.-bound flights from London, were delegated to a succession of operational commanders, none of whom survived very long. Bin Laden himself became known only as a disembodied voice in an audiotape or a grainy image on the occasional video.

Even in this reduced role, however, bin Laden was a malignant, animating spirit in dozens of smaller-scale terrorist plots and attacks -- and this is a role he can play in death as well. Al Qaeda has metastasized into an inchoate decentralized movement of Islamist terrorists and cells around the world.

At the same time, the removal of bin Laden from the terrorism equation may complicate U.S. global counterterrorism operations. Perceptions matter in politics, at home and internationally. Many of the most important features of an effective counterterrorism program -- recruitment of human agents, unilateral use of deadly force with the risk of collateral damage, and the apprehension, interrogation, and, sometimes, rendition of suspects -- are distasteful, politically and legally risky, and unpopular.

The destruction on 9/11 and the ensuing wrath of the U.S. president and people scared governments that had not previously cooperated with U.S.-led counterterrorism efforts into doing so. The two-way flow of intelligence between Washington and many different capitals increased dramatically. Much of this intelligence related to individual suspected terrorists, some of whom were then arrested or killed with the cooperation or at least the acquiescence of their own governments. Although not unprecedented, this degree of coordination between the United States and other countries -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Malaysia, Kenya, to name only a few -- that previously had a skeptical if not antagonistic view of U.S. foreign policy was historically unusual. It is possible that bin Laden’s death will come to be seen as the end of the golden years of counterterrorism, an aberrational decade in global politics in which national governments cooperated as never before to deal with a sub-state transnational threat.

Nowhere is this more true than in Pakistan, the country where bin Laden and many of his al Qaeda followers hid after he escaped U.S. and British special forces in Afghanistan. Although never as safe as Afghanistan under the Taliban, Pakistan was for al Qaeda close to a safe haven -- until early 2008, when President George W. Bush, losing all patience and faith in the Pakistani government’s willingness and ability to take on al Qaeda, authorized an escalation of direct U.S. action against al Qaeda and other extremists inside Pakistan. U.S. drone strikes rose from four in 2007 to 33 in 2008; this pace has only increased under Obama, from 53 in 2009 to 118 in 2010 (all data from the New America Foundation). Meanwhile, word of secret U.S. commando raids into Pakistan from U.S. bases in Afghanistan began to leak out.

Stepped-up U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan have not been popular among Pakistan’s ruling elite or its people, particularly as U.S. drone strikes began to target indigenous Pakistani extremist groups such as Tehrik-i-Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although militants from these groups provide shelter and training to some al Qaeda operatives, they have had little if any operational ambition outside of South Asia. The Pakistani government will likely take a few weeks to get over its embarrassment about bin Laden’s long-standing presence just outside Islamabad, but once it does there is little doubt that it will resume and perhaps even intensify its demands that the United States recede from encroachments against Pakistani sovereignty.

Washington, for its part, will find it difficult to ignore these calls as it weighs other vital U.S. interests in Pakistan, such as the security of the Pakistani nuclear weapons arsenal, the ability to resupply U.S. forces in Afghanistan from Pakistani seaports, and the stability of Indo-Pakistani relations.