Why hasn't Osama bin Laden's death stirred open anger in the Arab world? Has he been rendered somehow irrelevant by the Arab Spring or Arab Awakening? "Osama was much more popular five years, eight years ago than he is today. He's just kind of irrelevant today," says Dexter Filkins of New York Times, who recently spent six weeks in the middle of a "slow-motion revolution" in Yemen, at the Charlie Rose show.
There is another perspective to these questions. Dr Dia Rashwan, political expert at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, "the defeat of al Qaeda or the murder of Osama bin Laden was not the victory of President Barack Obama and the US forces, "but was a result of the revolts of the Arab people which contradicts the organisation of Bin Laden's in its consecutive revolutions against dictatorship, tyranny and foreign hegemony".
In his statement to Al-Jazeera, he claims that "the followers of Bin Laden will carry out new operations in retaliation for the killing of their leader, according to Ikhawanweb, the official website of the Muslim Brothers".
In this respect, a purportedly recorded message of Osama's deputy Ayman al Zawahiri that he issued last month can be highly instructive. In his message, the Egyptian-born al Qaeda leader whose worldview was shaped by the teachings of one of the most revered leaders of the Muslim Brothers, Syed Qutub, called on Muslims in North Africa to fight Nato forces in Libya. In that statement, "he also accused the US of supporting former Tunisian and Egyptian presidents, but only withdrawing their support when they were no longer beneficial to US interests".
Miffed by Zawahiri's statement, Engineer Khaled Hamza, Chief Editor of Ikhwanweb, describes it as "a desperate attempt by al Qaeda to impose itself as a player for change amidst the huge popular and international support for non-violent revolutions across the Arab world". The killing of Osama bin Laden is seemed to have brought Pakistan under the sharp focus of mainstream Arab media, which argues that the bin Laden's location in an urban center of this South Asian country has further inflamed tensions between Islamabad and Washington.
For example, the Arab world's most influential TV channel, Al-jazeera, has been found to be offering a conclusion that the US' 10-year alliance with the country is now in jeopardy. In one of its highly-rated programmes, "Inside Story", the discussion revolves around questions such as: Just what impact will this have on the two countries? And will the US ever trust Pakistan in its war against al- Qaeda?
What if the Pakistanis say `we know the game is up and we have to change and we will change'? This is a question that Charlie Rose put to one of his guests at the same programme in which he raises the question about the Arab street's reaction to bin Laden's death.
According to Steve Coll of the New America Foundation, the Pakistanis have played this hand of cards 20 to 30 times before and they know that the United States will be constrained in putting pressure on them. "They've positioned themselves as a country that is too big to fail. They may be correct in their analysis that they are too big to fail....they [the Pakistanis] may not really want a durable strategic alliance [with the US], but one thing they need is IMF support. They need credibility in the international financial system and they need access to cash because they are going to continue to face a very bumpy economic road over the next couple of years".
He points out that Pakistan has a deep alliance with China that gives it "a little bit of cushion". According to him, Pakistan is going to look for a middle ground here for something to allow it to bump through the obvious questions that are raised by the circumstances of bin Ladin's death. "You know, for the United States, I think it is similar. The United States is trying to manage a very complicated exit strategy from Afghanistan. The last thing it wants now is a full-blown confrontation with Pakistan that would disrupt this," says he.
Coll also says that the US made assumptions about Pakistan not being co-operative--certainly on the Taliban and less on al Qaeda. "It's not absolutely shocking to consider the possibility that Pakistani intelligence might have known bin Laden's location. So I think the United States too has reasons to kinda muddle through at least for now. It has got a lot on its plate in Afghanistan," according to Coll.
Comments
Comments are closed.