After bin Laden

Osama bin Laden’s physical disappearance should also mean the disappearance of the political disasters in which he was involved, as well as those that he provoked. The main contribution of al-Qaida’s leader to the history of universal wickedness is the transformation of terrorism into the essence of a new type of extensive and destructive warfare, whose only battleground is civil society and whose main victims are anonymous defenseless citizens, Westerners and non-Westerners, Muslims and Christians. But it is not his only contribution: the cynical exploitation of weak and corrupt states; the promotion of a clandestine criminal network, or rather, of a criminal franchise with religious alibis, to the status of political actor; and the attempt to establish the most fanatical fantasies as international law are other contributions of his.

The Muslims were the first to bury this legacy of bin Laden, even before his death. So did the Arab revolutionary movements that were inspired by democratic principles, antithesis to the theocratic and dictatorial doctrine that al-Qaida’s founder proclaimed. The West should now in turn get rid of the negative aspects of its response to jihadism. Human rights are not defended by restricting and compartmentalizing them, not even temporarily. The anxiety in face of terror, the ensuing hysteria and the feeling of exception are understandable, but not effective in the long term.

The United States, which, especially under George W. Bush, proclaimed a permanent global state of exception and validated torture, extraterritorial detentions and illegal wars, should reflect upon the fact that the successful operation against bin Laden happened after all these political measures became outdated and declined. Furthermore, due to them, Guantanamo has done much more to discredit democracy rather than to promote it.

The exact knowledge of what happened in Pakistan will show to what point Obama was scrupulous in his use of legitimate methods which democracies use to combat their enemies, by making exceptions to the principle of “ends justifying the means.”

Yet it would be difficult to deny that the U.S. is legally involved in a legitimate war against al-Qaida. This was stated in a United Nations Resolution after 9/11. Therefore, the action of the unit that killed bin Laden would merely be considered another act of war. And although jihadism has tried to blur the line between assassination and military action, between the state and the religious mafia, between imposition and respect, no sensible person should submit to the same rules of the game. Questioning the legitimacy of your own actions is the first principle of a liberal culture.