Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (36 page)
Read Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad Online
Authors: Peter L. Bergen
Tags: #Intelligence & Espionage, #Political Freedom & Security, #21st Century, #United States, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #History
Despite Zawahiri’s shortcomings and the serious institutional problems he has inherited, there are some opportunities for him to help resuscitate al-Qaeda. As the early great promise of the Arab Spring recedes, it is likely that Zawahiri will try to exploit the regional chaos to achieve his central goal: establishing a new haven for al-Qaeda. The one place where he might be able to pull this off is Yemen. Like bin Laden, many of al-Qaeda’s members have roots in Yemen, and U.S. counterterrorism officials have identified the al-Qaeda
affiliate there as
the most dangerous of the group’s regional branches. And the civil war now engulfing Yemen has already provided an opportunity for jihadist militants to seize towns in the south of the country. Surely al-Qaeda will want to build on this feat in a country that is the nearest analogue today to pre-9/11 Afghanistan: a largely tribal, heavily armed, dirt-poor nation scarred by years of war.
O
SAMA BIN LADEN
long fancied himself something of a poet. His compositions tended to the morbid, and a poem written two years after 9/11 in which he contemplated the circumstances of his death was no exception. Bin Laden wrote, “
Let my grave be an eagle’s belly, its resting place in the sky’s atmosphere amongst perched eagles.” But there was no spectacular martyrdom in the mountains among the eagles. Instead bin Laden died surrounded by his wives in a squalid suburban compound awash in broken glass and scattered children’s toys and medicine bottles—testament to the ferocity of the SEALs’ assault on his final hiding place. And on February 25, 2012, Pakistani authorities
sent mechanized diggers to the compound that tore the complex down, erasing bin Laden’s six-year sojourn in Abbottabad over the course of a weekend.
If there is poetry in bin Laden’s end, it is the poetry of justice, and it calls to mind President George W. Bush’s words to Congress just nine days after 9/11, when he predicted that bin Laden and al-Qaeda would eventually be consigned to “
history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies,” just as communism and Nazism had been before them. President Barack Obama has characterized al-Qaeda and its affiliates as “
small men on the wrong side of history.”
For al-Qaeda, that history sped up dramatically, as bin Laden’s body sank down into the deep.
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