NEW DELHI — Where is Osama Bin Laden? President Pervez Musharraf thinks he is dead. Maybe he just hopes he is dead. Nothing would be more inconvenient for President George Bush’s newest friend than an Bin Laden discovered, possibly clean-shaven, in a nondescript safe house in Pakistan.
Would Pakistan’s president be able to hand over Bin Laden to America’s president? Intentions are not in question: He would certainly like to. He could later go on his favorite medium, television, and explain that since Bin Laden was not a Pakistani citizen he did not feel duty-bound to save him for a local trial. Nor have the Americans come halfway around the world to watch Bin Laden being tried by a Shariah court. But the reaction would be another story. The street would probably not erupt immediately, but it would smolder. The street has been subdued by the crackle of events since September. But it is foolish to underestimate a volcano merely because it has not overflown in front of today’s television coverage.
As Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes pointed out so often, there cannot be a death without a body. Bin Laden may not these days be presumed innocent until convicted, but he must be presumed alive till buried. The question is larger, and more intriguing, than the fate of only Bin Laden.
He was a political recluse, for obvious reasons, but not a hermit. He had wives and children, some living with him in Afghanistan. During the war a videotape was circulated in which two young sons of Bin Laden were also shown with him in Afghanistan. Where is this family? They could not have disappeared into thin air, could they? The air is not so thin over Afghanistan, or Pakistan, as to enable a large family and entourage to vanish without a trace.
Where, similarly, is Mullah Omar? Where are his wives and his children? Where are those who occupied his palatial residence in Kandahar? Lurid stories are occasionally put out that Mullah Omar was last seen on a motorcycle, riding off into the sunset, with his second or third wife in pillion. I do not buy such junk. Neither history nor its saucy cousin, journalism, are kind to losers. Where, indeed, is the top leadership of the Taleban Cabinet? Afghanistan had a functioning government, replete with Cabinet ministers: where are they now? So many questions, so few answers.
A good person to ask would be Hamid Karzai, although you might have to phrase the question a bit differently. Where was he, and where were many of the members of his government when Mullah Omar and Bin Laden were in power? They were not always in exile, or on the run, or in a sanctuary provided by a neighboring power. The Northern Alliance was at permanent war. The answer is evident. The whole of Afghanistan has almost never been under the complete control of any single government. There has always been space, even if they are no more than the nooks and crannies of a large country, out of the reach of even the most powerful government.
But this brings us to an uncomfortable fact. Such a large group of people, numbering in thousands, can live outside the range of a government, but they cannot live without the support of some people who provide the essentials of survival: Security, food and shelter.
The current dispensation in Afghanistan is much too loose and impromptu to command the allegiance of the whole country. Karzai barely has the resources to exercise his personal authority in Kabul. For other regions he must depend on the goodwill of those who, in the bad old days, were called warlords but whose designations have changed since they ended up on the winning side.
The point to note is that each one of them survived not only the Taleban but also the decade during which the Russians occupied Kabul. The Soviets might not had the technological eyesight of the present American arsenal, but they were not a Third World force. There is of course a vital difference in that the Pakistan government offered a safe haven that is not on offer now. But the relevant point is elsewhere. Afghanistan is deeper than its surface.
These worries must be nagging an officially exuberant Washington. This columnist learns that present American assessments envisage the presence of its troops in Pakistan and Afghanistan at least till the spring of 2003.
One presumes that the will to stay will not be undermined by the success of any sporadic sabotage mission: Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton both withdrew their troops, one from Beirut and the other from Somalia, after casualties. In Beirut a truck bomb killed more than two hundred soldiers, and in Somalia those familiar “warlords” sent back too many of those dreaded body bags.
In the old days the British handled the problem of Afghanistan with more Èlan. They simply declared victory and got the hell out.
The British conducted their first Afghan war in 1839 in order, they said, to keep the Russians out. They were premature in their assumptions by about 140 years, but that is another matter. Their war aim was to remove the widely admired Dost Muhammad Khan, of whom it was said: “Is Dost Muhammad dead that there is no justice?”
They raised the much-vaunted Army of the Indus in order to place their protégé Shah Shuja, who had been living in their care in Ludhiana, on the throne. It had to be the Army of the Indus because the sharp-eyed Ranjit Singh (he had only one eye, but it was sharp) refused, despite his alliance with them, to let the British cross his territories on their way to Kabul.
Kabul fell without a fuss. It always does. The British “coronated” Shah Shuja (at Kandahar, as it so happened) and settled down to enjoy two years of polo. Dost Muhammad took shelter with the emir of Bukhara and handed over leadership of the jihad to his favorite son Akbar Khan. He also, in an astute move, handed himself over to the British, confident that they always kept space for an alternative in their policy.
The British were wise; they kept Dost Muhammad this time in India. In 1842 Akbar Khan surprised the complacent British garrison in Kabul. By the time it found “safety” in Jalalabad, some 20,000 British Army lives had been lost and, famously, only one man survived: Dr. William Brydon (he was a great survivor; he also survived the siege of Lucknow). The Army of Retribution succeeded where the Army of the Indus had failed. The red coats returned to Kabul, hanged a few people and, in a triumph of diplomacy, reinstalled Dost Muhammad. It was the ultimate victory. Both sides won.
That is the way they prefer it in Afghanistan. History, denying Marx his aphorism, repeated itself in the second Afghan war fought by the British 40 years later.
President Bush once said that he wanted Bin Laden dead or alive. Having conquered a country in search of one man, one can appreciate that Bush cannot really declare victory until he has brought that one man to the in-camera military tribunals that have been created, at great cost to the spirit of American justice, only for him.
But it is a moot point whether the Americans would actually want either Bin Laden or the reclusive Mullah Omar alive. What are the odds that it would be difficult to indict Mullah Omar for anything other than abatement of terrorism in an American court?
A trial of Bin Laden could be kept in camera, but could it really be kept out of the purview of a million journalists waiting at the door for anything that they could pick up? Could anyone really prevent Bin Laden’s lawyers from talking, or him from grandstanding? Would any statement he made become the inspiration for the next round of attacks on America and the American presence worldwide?
America is now militarily engaged in almost all the key areas of conflict in the world. Going by Bush’s State of the Union address, his appetite for war has increased: Both Iraq and Iran are now within his target-range, with North Korea getting a nod as well to await its turn. Perhaps a few people in Washington and Islamabad are thinking through the consequences of adding a Bin Laden trial into such a volatile scenario. Perhaps.
Is Bin Laden safer (for America) lost in some mystery never-never land? Protected by a pronouncement of death that has never been proved? What, to return to a parallel mystery, happens to the families? Are they also to be presumed dead-disappeared? Will those boys on videotape never grow up? So many questions. So few answers.
