Would you rather pay more to get the same amount of food, or pay the same as before, and get less? Inflation gives you the opportunity to consider such existential questions…
What We Didn’t Know Back Then
One of the greatest films I’ve ever seen was Zero Dark Thirty (2012). It deserved the countless award nominations it garnered, including five Academy Awards. It’s an espionage thriller like few others. No doubt the experience is heightened for the viewer by knowing that this stuff actually happened, at least most of it.
The film tells the story of the CIA’s decade-long search for Osama bin Laden, culminating in the Navy Seal mission that killed him. That event feels like ancient history for many people. It was, after all, over a decade ago. So much has changed in the way we think about terrorism, particularly the shape of Islamic extremism. We’re also a forgetful society, living from news cycle to news cycle. An unfortunate side-effect of this amnesia is that we not only forget pivotal moments in our history; we misremember the context.
I’ll be the first to say that the wars conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq had many strategic and political failures. It’s perfectly acceptable to defend American military involvement, but even the most strenuous defenses should always be honest about risks, motivations, and costs on the front end, and causalities, consequences, and mistakes on the back end.
That said, a recent segment on 60 Minutes deepens our perspective on the impact the War on Terror had on its chief enemy: Al-Qaeda. [1]
Remember that when Seal Team 6 killed bin Laden, they also recovered a massive trove of documents from the compound where he and his family were living in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Though declassified in 2017, the documents remained mostly unorganized and untranslated for some time—which is stunning when we consider the blood and treasure expended on bin Laden’s capture.
Author and Islamic scholar Nelly Lahoud has combed through nearly 6,000 pages of the personal notes, letters, and journals recovered. Her work has been published as The Bin Laden Papers. Lahoud’s project is illuminating and surprising.
For example, "[bin Laden] thought that the American people would take to the streets, replicate the anti-Vietnam War protests, and they would put pressure on their government to withdraw from Muslim majority states,” Lahoud told a CBS correspondent. As many readers will remember, Americans were overwhelmingly united in their support for military action in Afghanistan.
Nelly Lahoud and 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfosni go through documents recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound (ERIC KERCHNER/CBS NEWS)
Bin Laden was also surprised and exasperated by the fact that so few Americans died in Afghanistan as opposed to Vietnam. His planning had been methodical, but his grasp of American culture was shortsighted. He intended to divide the American public against their government, knowing how crucial that would be for true victory in the jihad being waged.
Not only were these bin Laden’s initial goals, but he had bigger ambitions. In years following 9/11, he had planned other attacks. In a unique show of disdain for President Bush, he wrote that attacks in states that had voted for his 2004 reelection should have priority. He had many ideas on how to hijack more planes, chartering them if necessary. He even had meticulous plans for how railways and other vital infrastructure could be attacked. As late as 2010 (a year before his death), he was still planning attacks.
Many analysts have rightly observed that Al-Qaeda’s capabilities in the immediate years following 9/11 were profoundly degraded. Documents bin Laden wrote or received clearly confirm this truth. Nevertheless, his appetite for American carnage persisted. Lahoud sums it up well: “the disconnect between his ambitions and between his capabilities is confounding.”
Another surprise from the bin Laden documents is the significant role that the women in his life had in his plans. He had multiple wives and daughters involved in crafting his videos that would be shared with the world. In one letter, a wife shames and incites men to forsake cowardice and take up jihad for the sake of their children. So much for the stereotypical picture of Muslim wives. In Islam, women are never the public face of jihad.
Bin Laden’s plans and perspective are a mixed bag. Despite his success, he failed miserably compared to his larger slate of goals. He both despised Americans and coveted them. Certainly attacks on civilian targets and trying to provoke anti-war riots show a profound hatred for human life. At the same time, Lahoud says that bin Laden’s letters show that he saw the power of commanding their sympathy. As she notes, "Interestingly, he didn't want to shed the blood of Americans…He really wanted their votes."
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, support for American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq waned significantly, especially in Iraq. Who could forget the strenuous efforts by many on the political left and right to recast Islam to make it seem as though violence against infidels had no basis in actual Islamic doctrine? Such efforts were noble in many cases, especially in recognizing the many peace-loving Muslims in the United States and abroad. It’s also true that more extreme parties tried to rationalize what Al-Qaeda had done, blaming the American government more than the terrorists for what had happened. Truly, we had our divisions. One would be a fool not to acknowledge that. Barack Obama securing the Democratic nomination owed significantly to having voted against the war in Iraq.
Yet I think it’s still safe to say that the American resolve to not go “full-Vietnam” in terms of how we treated servicemen and our government probably helped us have as much success as we eventually would in degrading terrorist capacity abroad.
Pay attention to the fact that American intelligence agencies were able to foil so many attacks in the years following 9/11. I understand how controversial the Patriot Act was. And I certainly think that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques are morally dubious at best, and at worst merit a lengthy discussion of means and ends. But for all those who desired a quick and tidy retreat following the initial strikes against our enemies, what may have happened had that advice been taken? Would your state capital have been the one attacked next?
What the bin Laden tapes remind us of is that our initial assessments and impressions about situations are sometimes wrong. Very wrong. Being wrong is usually costly, but sometimes it’s incredibly costly. As we deliberate on different questions of foreign and domestic policy, massive spending bills, “discovering” new Constitutional rights, how we carry out elections, and a thousand other principles and policies, we need to spend more time considering the cost of being wrong.
No one is infallible. Bureaucrats get things wrong. Legislators get things wrong. Voters get things wrong. Such knowledge should instill in us the humility to recognize that a decade or more in the future will bring a reckoning. New information will come to light. Documents will be declassified (and translated if necessary). Our fallibility will shine like the morning sun.
It’s not clear to me how U.S. officials would have handled things had they known the full scope of bin Laden’s plans and activities. But this is yet another significant episode in American military and intelligence history when some hunches were proven right, and some were quite wrong.
[1] One also can find it named “al Qaeda” in various sources.
Currently Reading:
Kevin DeYoung, Amaze them with God: Winning the Next Generation for Christ
Quote of the Week:
I can feel Twitter working on me as I’ve begun to use it more frequently of late and allowed myself to tweet as well as read. I can feel it working on me in much the same way that, in Tolkien’s world, the wearers of the Ring can feel it working on them. It leaves one feeling weary, thin, exposed, morally compromised, divided, etc., while deeply distorting one’s view of reality. And, as far as I’m concerned, in this case there are no Tom Bombadils among us immune to the Ring’s power. (Michael Sacasas, “On Twitter, Briefly,” The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 6)