Posted on 05/02/2011 10:34:31 PM PDT by cold start
Osama bin Laden died on Walpurgisnacht, the night of black sabbaths and bonfires. Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight. One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was Ding, Dong, the witch is dead, and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting U-S-A! last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere. Almost a decade after the horror of 9/11, the long manhunt had found its quarry, and Americans will be feeling less helpless this morning, and pleased at the message that his death sends: Attack us and we will hunt you down, and you will not escape.
Many of us didnt believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. An extremely big man, 6-foot 4-inches tall in a country where the average male height is around 5-foot 8, wandering around unnoticed for ten years while half the satellites above the earth were looking for him? It didnt make sense. Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich mans house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. The U.S. administration confesses it was shocked by the elaborate nature of the compound.
We had heardI certainly had, from more than one Pakistani journalistthat Mullah Omar was (is) being protected in a safe house run by the powerful and feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) somewhere in the vicinity of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan, and it seemed likely that bin Laden, too, would acquire a home of his own.
In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, all the big questions need to be answered by Pakistan. The old flim-flam (Who, us? We knew nothing!) just isnt going to wash, must not be allowed to wash by countries such as the United States that have persisted in treating Pakistan as an ally even though they have long known about the Pakistani double gameits support, for example, for the Haqqani network that has killed hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan.
This time the facts speak too loudly to be hushed up. Osama bin Laden, the worlds most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistans equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didnt know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?
Pakistans neighbor India, badly wounded by the November 26, 2008, terrorist attacks on Mumbai, is already demanding answers. As far as the anti-Indian jihadist groups are concernedLashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-MuhammadPakistans support for such groups, its willingness to provide them with safe havens, its encouragement of such groups as a means of waging a proxy war in Kashmir and, of course, in Mumbaiis established beyond all argument. In recent years these groups have been reaching out to the so-called Pakistani Taliban to form new networks of violence, and it is worth noting that the first threats of retaliation for bin Ladens death have been made by the Pakistani Taliban, not by any al Qaeda spokesman.
India, as always Pakistans unhealthy obsession, is the reason for the double game. Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about Indias supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
For a long time now America has been tolerating the Pakistani double game in the knowledge that it needs Pakistani support in its Afghan enterprise, and in the hope that Pakistans leaders will understand that they are miscalculating badly, that the jihadists want their jobs. Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons, is a far greater prize than poor Afghanistan, and the generals and spymasters who are playing al Qaedas game today may, if the worst were to happen, become the extremists victims tomorrow.
There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Ladens compound provides further proof of Pakistans dangerous folly.
As the world braces for the terrorists response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations.
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novelsGrimus, Midnights Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and, recently, the Booker of all Bookers), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moors Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Lifeand one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published three works of nonfictionThe Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, and Step Across This Lineand co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a former president of American PEN.
I’m just wondering....should we expect the ME cauldron to boil over in a massive way real soon?
Already has reached the rim.
Name one ME/African country that isn’t at turmoil of some kind or another?
There aren’t any. Where there are Muslims there’s turmoil.
“Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble”
Stop Jihad Now!
No, he didn't. Walpurgisnacht is the night from April 30 to May 1. OBL was killed one night later. Now shut up, Salman, no one gives cr*p about you anymore.
Old Man of the Mountains is more than justa literary reference, it is a historical one. It refers to Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the Emire of Alamut and leader of the Hashshashin, the original Islamic terrorists. The analogy isn’t perfect at the Hashishin were Ismaili Shi’ites not Sunni fundamentalists. However, it does resonate well.
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