FAMILIAR
TERRITORY: Journalist Michael Ware covering the
conflict in Iraq.
Source: Supplied
BARACK
Obama and his agency chiefs could not have scripted
the killing of Osama bin Laden better if they had
tried.
In a daring, breathtaking and clinically lethal
operation they cut him down right where he lived.
The raid makes the passing of a long, bloody decade
of war since 9/11. It comes as the great price of
treasure and blood - around 6000 US combat deaths and
hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths - continues
to be paid.
But in August last year US intelligence finally
unearthed the lead they had been so desperately
seeking. It allowed them to track and hunt down the
masterfully elusive al-Qa'ida leader in a plush
Pakistani mansion.
From a base in wartorn Afghanistan, the US President
unleashed a strike force of elite Navy SEALs, teams
most certainly filled with the kind of hardened
warriors I've come to know in America's wars. At
night the airborne assault choppered across
Pakistan's badlands, al-Qa'ida and the Taliban's
heartland.
The
team landed in Abbottabad, 100km outside of the
capital Islamabad, deep in to Pakistani soil. Neither
the Pakistani government nor its intelligence
agencies long known for their ongoing lines of
communication with Islamic militant groups killing
American, British and Australian troops knew American
boots were setting foot on their soil. That alone is,
at least publicly, a first since the wars began.
Storming in to the multi-layered luxury compound
where Osama was hiding, the SEALs gave him the chance
to surrender. When he refused, they blew him away
with shots to the head. And at last, the al-Qa'ida
inspiration for the 9/11 attacks lay dead in a pool
of his own blood.
President Obama could not have done it better. But,
then again, neither could have al-Qa'ida.
For hardline Islamic militants continuing the "holy
war", or jihad, Osama bin Laden inflamed, he will
forever now be revered as a martyr. Osama was not,
unlike others in his command, slain with the
anonymity of drone missile strikes or, even worse,
like Iraq's secular former dictator Saddam Hussein
(who had no connection to bin Laden at all) captured
in disgrace and paraded by America for all to see.
No. Bin Laden, or so will go the jihadi lore, went
down in a blaze of defiant glory. Dying as he lived.
Fighting the infidels of America to bitter end.
Eschewing surrender and choosing, on his own terms,
his martyrdom.
It is dark reality that his death with inevitability
be a rallying point. And in death he may be as
valuable a symbol to al-Qa'ida as he was in life.
I know this because, to some extent and far more than
perhaps I would have liked, I know al-Qa'ida. In Iraq
in 2004 I was taken to one of their training camps.
Months later I was kidnapped by frenzied al-Qa'ida
fighters who readied me for execution beneath one of
their banners. The man who was to sever my head from
body beside me, eager in anticipation. My execution
to be filmed on my own camera.
Too many times I have seen in to their eyes,
witnessed their work, been taken inside their
disciplined and brutishly effective organisation.
So trust me, at enormous price that I and my family
have and to this day still pay, I know.
At their training camp in an Iraqi village their
combat schools were invisible from the air or to an
uninitiated eye. Mortar schools were conducted in one
house. Sniper training in a barn. Infantry skills in
a mosque. And so on.
Even Iraqi insurgents, who had fought and killed in
battles with well-trained American forces, feared
them. "These al-Qa'ida leaders," said one top
insurgent commander, "they don't even trust their own
clothes. You never know what they're thinking, from
one moment to the next. To be honest, they scare even
me."
But when I hinted yesterday on television, within
hours of his death, how al-Qa'ida may write the tale
of Osama's death a twit here in Australia Twittered I
"sounded like an apologist for bin Laden during the
4.30 news". It's dull thinking like that, in the
past, that hampered Western efforts to delve deep
enough in to al-Qa'ida to find the leader they killed
yesterday.
An unpalatable reality we must prepare for is that an
enduring legacy of bin Laden's life may yet prove to
be the manner of his death.
Make no mistake, his slaying is without a doubt a
heavy symbolic body blow to the al-Qa'ida
organisation. But when it comes to its ability to
continue waging its campaign of attacks and terror
that's all it promises to be. Symbolic.
No-one in the Pentagon or at the CIA's Virginia
headquarters expects it to be anything more.
For al-Qa'ida is an organisation built for loss. It's
remarkable ability to regenerate is tested and
well-proven. In these years of war its lost
footsoldiers, bombmakers, facilitators, mid-ranking
leaders and some of its highest-ranking strategic
chiefs. And yet it has not laid down. In fact, it
continues to evolve.
Its strength has never been in its numbers, but in
its vision and its ideas. It has "franchised" its
particular brand of Islamic war and spread it far. It
has encouraged leaders to emerge, poles of charisma
and attraction for young recruits and the money
seeking to support it, and for its "branches" to
flourish. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsular, based
primarily in Yemen, an example of its gnarliest and
most formidable outfits. That group's best publicised
plot of late was thwarted only when it was already
under way in a bid to send bombs once again to the
United States.
The shockwaves reverberating out from bin Laden's
death - those of unfettered jubilation in the US with
chants of "USA, USA" and those elsewhere in the world
- go far beyond questions over the next generation of
al-Qa'ida leaders.
That bin Laden was cornered where he was, not only in
Pakistan but so deep inside its sovereign soil and so
much beyond the wild frontier provinces, has
implications yet to ripple out. And those ripples,
like quake-sparked tsunamis in the ocean, must be
watched with attentive eyes.
That Pakistan's intelligence apparatus, an American
and, for that matter, an Australian "ally", had not
detected or revealed bin Laden's presence in such a
populous city so closely tied to the nation's
military raises a plethora of difficult questions.
In July 2009 a two-star Pakistani general, the
spokesman for the country's intelligence agency, went
on camera with me to say the agency, while not
supporting the militants in any way, maintained
contact with the Afghan Taliban and other
highly-targeted groups killing Americans. Such is the
role of spy agencies, even the CIA acknowledges that.
But to have bin Laden so close and not to have known?
Or worse, to not have told? Therein lies the rub.
A former director of that Pakistani agency, and a
friend of mine, is widely credited with creating the
Taliban. The general is now long "retired" and living
not far from the capital. When I last met him, at his
house in Pakistan, his son an urbane, sophisticated,
extremely likeable English speaker of great education
told me of his days fighting Russians literally
alongside bin Laden.
Are these ties of the kind that bind? Bin Laden's
death brings these things, and so much, once again in
to stark relief. Even for Australia.
With our troops in contact in Afghanistan's rugged
Uruzgan province, a hard piece of land, bin Laden's
death will do nothing to make our diggers safer. Nor
will it accelerate their coming home. The war we are
fighting in that far off land has had little, if
anything, to do with Osama bin Laden.
Certainly, it's had no bearing on the hunt to kill or
capture him. There we fight Afghan Taliban, led by
the cleric Mullah Omar. And the Taliban's cause, and
its capacity to wage war, drew nothing from bin
Laden.
But our men and women will continue to fight with
honour and bravery, of the kind that President Obama
so justly attributed to the SEALs who killed bin
Laden.
Those men, said the president, displayed
"extraordinary courage and ability". He's right. I've
known many Navy SEALs. I can tell you those
battle-hardened SEALs who entered Osama's compound
did so also with a particular kind of relish, eagerly
embracing the chance to confront bin Laden.
But it's with a heavy heart that I suspect we are
still going to need those men with the courage and
the relish to confront al-Qa'ida because its story is
far from over.
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Michael
Ware previously worked for The
Courier-Mail