Understanding Osama’s Legacy
Exactly a week before the May 2, 2011 raid that claimed his life, Osama bin Laden authored what may have been his last letter. From inside his Abbottabad safehouse, al-Qaeda’s chief had watched as Hosni Mubarak and Zain al-Abedin Ben Ali were overthrown; he was convinced that “the fall of the remaining tyrants in the region was inevitable.” Bin Laden wrote: “If we double our efforts towards guiding, educating and warning Muslim people against half-solutions, by carefully presenting [our] advice, then the next phase will [lead to a triumph] for Islam”. In the year since bin Laden’s death, experts have debated whether this is something al-Qaeda can in fact do. Earlier this week, the Combating Terrorism Centre at the West Point military academy in the United States released 17 documents recovered from Osama bin Laden’s home in Abbottabad — 175 pages of a trove that is reported, though not confirmed, to run into thousands of pages. Like all primary documents, the Abbottabad letters need careful contextualisation and analysis, but do offer a new prism through which bin Laden’s mindset, and legacy, can be examined.
Even though al-Qaeda has haemorrhaged leaders since 9/11, its inheritors have gained strength across the region. In 2003, Saudi jihadists set up al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which now controls significant parts of Yemen. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has waged a successful war of attrition against the United States in Afghanistan and terrorised the Pakistani state into near-submission, especially in the agency areas. Even though al-Qaeda in Iraq or al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have fared less well, they are significant actors. Bin Laden, the letters show, was no enthusiast for these allies — far from the puppet-master some media accounts made him out to be. He comes across as contemptuous of organisations like the TTP, and dismissive of iconic young jihadists like Anwar al-Awlaki. We know little of what the new jihadists privately made of him — but the very existence of these organisations represented a success for bin Laden. Al-Qaeda’s purpose — as its very name, “the base” suggests — was to provide resources for the wider jihadist movement. Bin Laden, the letters show, feared the affiliates might be seduced by their local successes, and lose sight of their global objectives. He warned the Yemeni jihadists, for example, that even a weakened U.S. “continues to have capabilities that would enable it to bring down any state that we might establish”. Long before his death, al-Qaeda’s chief had been relegated to the margins of the jihadist movement. The cause he killed and died for, though, is very far from spent.