http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0511/steyn050911.php3
May 9, 2011 / 5 Iyar, 5771
Why Pakistan knew it could hide Osama
By Mark Steyn
http://jewishworldreview.com/op-art/pakistan_nose.jpg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | As my old friends at The Spectator in
London pointed out Monday morning, I scooped the entire planet in breaking
the news of Osama bin Laden's death: "Osama bin Laden is dead, says Mark
Steyn." This was in The Spectator's edition of June 29, 2002, which turned
out to be a wee bit premature. I jumped the gun, much like Osama's missus in
Abbottabad, but by nine years.
Nor, to be honest, was a teensy-weensy near-decade discrepancy in the date
the only problem with my scoop. Much of that Spectator piece was preoccupied
with the usual assumptions about Public Enemy Number One - caves, dialysis,
remote wild Pakistani tribal lands where Western intelligence hasn't a hope
of penetrating unless you turn a cousin of the village headman, etc. All
these assumptions prevailed until a few days ago, when it emerged that
Osama, three wives and 13 children had been living in town in a
purpose-built pad round the corner from the Pakistani Military Academy for
over half a decade. Brunch every Sunday with a couple of generals at his
usual corner table at the Abbottabad Hilton? Eggs Benedict, hold the ham?
The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well
- elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological
sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the
event (including White House news management so club-footed that one starts
to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies
what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our "ally," hides and protects
not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the
knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery - indeed, confident
that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.
If this were a movie, the crowds cheering "USA! USA!" outside the White
House would be right: The bad guy is dead! We win! The End. But the big
picture is bigger than Hollywood convention. In the great sweeping
narrative, the death of Osama bin Laden is barely a ripple, while the
courtesies afforded to him by the Pakistani establishment tell us something
profound about the superpower's weakness and inability to shift the
storyline. Bin Laden famously said that when people see a strong horse and a
weak horse they naturally prefer the strong horse. Putting a bullet through
his eye is a good way of letting him know which role he's consigned to. But
the strong horse/weak horse routine is a matter of perception as much as
anything else. On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my
military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin
Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts
of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair
routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the
Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they
didn't get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant
it.
A decade later, we're back to Sept. 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as
it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they'd
think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they've
got the superpower all figured out - that America is happy to spend
bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach
across the planet but it doesn't really have the stomach for changing the
facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist
will be having a quiet night in watching "Dancing With The Stars" when all
of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it's
time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger
picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way.
In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas
Friedman, the in-house thinker at The New York Times, offered this bit of
cartoon analysis:
"For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between
the Jetsons and the Flintstones - and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones
know it."
But they didn't, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided
their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their
way out.
When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it
took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years
to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered
the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point
of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it
as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out
of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later - and,
indeed, the locals fought for King and (distant imperial) country as brave
British troops during World War Two. Even more amazingly, generations of
English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi's skull winding up as
Lord Kitchener's novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national
greatness.
Not a lot of that today. It's hard to imagine Osama's noggin as an
attractive centerpiece at next year's White House Community Organizer of the
Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America's "educators"
teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our
difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no
sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world
that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an
observant Muslim.
That's why Pakistani big shots harbored America's mortal enemy and knew they
could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a
lot of those about funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to
Dearborn, Mich. They've walked their petrodollars round the Western world
buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university
"Middle Eastern Studies" departments. By comparison with his compatriots,
Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote,
"Junior's just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son - a
criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama,
who took his dad's fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the
ground."
A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running
around Afghanistan "winning hearts and minds" and getting gunned down by the
very policemen and soldiers they've spent years training. Back on the home
front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives
sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the UN, the EU,
at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in the "Facebook revolutions"
of "the Arab spring," the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of
Muslims support bin Laden's goal - the submission of the Western world to
Islam - but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is
entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with
state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The
Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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