Beyond Osama bin Laden.... ..Richard N. Haass

The killing of Osama bin Laden by United States special forces constitutes a significant victory over global terrorism. But it is a milestone, not a turning point, in what remains an ongoing struggle with no foreseeable end.

The significance of what was accomplished stems in part from bin Laden's symbolic importance. He has been an icon, representing the ability to strike with success against the US and the West. That icon has now been destroyed.

Another positive consequence is the demonstrated effect of counter-terrorism operations carried out by US soldiers. As a result, some terrorists, one hopes, will decide to become former terrorists – and some young radicals might now think twice before deciding to become terrorists in the first place.

But any celebration needs to be tempered by certain realities. Bin Laden's demise, as welcome as it is, should in no way be equated with the demise of terrorism.

Terrorism is a decentralised phenomenon – in its funding, planning, and execution. Removing bin Laden does not end the terrorist threat. There are successors, starting with Ayman al-Zawahiri in al-Qaeda, as well as in autonomous groups operating out of Yemen, Somalia, and other countries. So terrorism will continue. Indeed, it could even grow somewhat worse in the short run, as there are sure to be those who will want to show that they can still strike against the West.

Prevention

The best parallel that I can think of when it comes to understanding terrorism and how to deal with it is disease. There are steps that can and should be taken to attack or neutralise certain types of viruses or bacteria; to reduce vulnerability to infection; and to reduce the consequences of infection if, despite all of our efforts, we become ill. Disease is not something that can be eliminated, but often it can be managed.

There are obvious parallels with terrorism. As we have recently witnessed, terrorists can be attacked and stopped before they can cause harm; individuals and countries can be defended; and societies can take steps to bolster their resilience when they are successfully attacked, as on occasion they inevitably will be. These elements of a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy can reduce the threat to manageable, or at least tolerable, levels.

But tolerable is not good enough when it comes to protecting innocent life. We want to do better. The answer is to be found in the realm of prevention. More must be done to interrupt the recruitment of terrorists, thereby reducing the threat before it materialises.

Most terrorists today are young and male. And, while the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims are not terrorists, many of the world's terrorists are Muslim. It would help enormously in this regard if Arab and Muslim political leaders spoke out against the intentional killing of men, women, and children by anyone or any group for political purposes. There is also a pivotal role here for religious leaders, educators, and parents. Terrorism must be stripped of any legitimacy that it may be viewed as having.

'Arab Spring'

One potential positive development here stems from the political changes that we are seeing in many parts of the Middle East. There is a greater chance than before that young people will become more integrated in their own societies (and less susceptible to the appeal of extremism) if they enjoy greater political and economic opportunity.

Pakistan will most likely prove critical in determining the future prevalence of terrorism. Unfortunately, while it is home to some of the world's most dangerous terrorists, it is decidedly less than a full partner in the struggle against it. Some parts of the Pakistani government are sympathetic to terrorism and unwilling to act against it; other parts simply lack the capacity to act against it effectively.

Capacity is much easier to provide than will. The outside world can and should continue to provide assistance to help Pakistan acquire the strength and skills required to tackle modern-day terrorists.

But no amount of external assistance can compensate for a lack of motivation and commitment. Pakistani leaders must choose once and for all. It is not enough to be a limited partner in the struggle against terror; Pakistan needs to become a full partner.

There will be Pakistanis who protest against the recent American military action, arguing that it violated Pakistan's sovereignty. But sovereignty is not an absolute; it involves obligations as well as rights. Pakistanis must understand that they will forfeit some of those rights if they do not meet their obligation to ensure that their territory is not used to shelter terrorists.

If things do not change, the sort of independent military operation carried out by US soldiers will become less the exception than the rule. This is not nearly as desirable an outcome as Pakistan joining what should be a common international effort. At stake is not only assistance, but Pakistan's own future, for, in the absence of genuine commitment to counter-terrorism, it is only a matter of time before the country falls victim to the infection that it refuses to treat.

Richard N. Haass, formerly director of Policy Planning in the US State Department, is president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Al-Qaeda is its own worst enemy......Alia Brahimi

The Facebook page set up in honour of al-Qaeda's founder is entitled "We are all Osama bin Laden".  But it is this reality – the fact that anyone anywhere can commit a violent act using the al-Qaeda brand – which has proved most damaging for the organisation.

After 9/11 and the destruction of al-Qaeda's headquarters in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda fractured into a moving target, a global cadre of autonomous cells which enabled it to continue to both elude and fight its enemies. However, with the globalisation of his jihad, bin Laden's authority was at once far-reaching and fragmented. Ceding command-and-control to self-defined "al-Qaeda" franchises brought enormous setbacks.

Bin Laden portrayed al-Qaeda as a vanguard group with a clear and simple mandate: to defend Muslims. Every one of his statements made clear that his was a defensive jihad to protect the innocent blood of Muslims from a Crusader onslaught. All of his legal, moral and political arguments rested on this premise. Yet the credibility of bin Laden's claim to be acting in defence of Muslims exploded alongside the scores of suicide bombers dispatched to civilian centres with the direct intention of massacring swathes of (Muslim) civilians.

On the run in Pakistan, bin Laden and his colleagues at "al-Qaeda central" seemed unwilling, but more likely unable, to control their over- zealous offspring.  For example, two letters were sent to the emir of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, berating him for his fanaticism, reminding him that scenes of mass slaughter did not help al-Qaeda's cause - and counselling him that to alienate the population would contravene all of the fundamentals of politics and leadership. But Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi's savagery did not stop.

Turning the masses away from the cause

Citing Clausewitz, Mao and Giap, al-Qaeda's strategic thinkers had always emphasised the importance of attracting the support of the Muslim masses to the global jihad. The people were the sea in which al-Qaeda's militants were supposed to swim and, without whom, the mujahidin would be "crushed in the shadows".  And so, in a remarkably candid audiotape aired on Al Jazeera in October 2007, bin Laden advised the "brothers in al-Qaeda everywhere" not to succumb to extremism.  Allegiance to the umma - the global community of Muslims - had to be placed above that of tribe and sect.

Bin Laden's aim was to lead a popular and mainstream resistance movement, yet al-Qaeda's reckless affiliates and their fanatical footmen consigned the group to the more radical margins of the umma.  Their means (massacring Muslims) contradicted bin Laden's stated end (protecting the umma).

But it was bin Laden himself who had helped make this possible, by contributing spectacularly to the democratisation of Islamic authority. Extending the arguments which had been made decades before by radical ideologues like Sayed Qutb, bin Laden claimed that the region's rulers and the traditional clergy were too weak and corrupt to protect Muslim blood. Individual Muslims had not only a right but a duty to take matters into their own hands.  Re-inventing the Islamic legal concept of fard ayn (individual duty for jihad), bin Laden eroded the authority of the clergy, without being able to claim a monopoly over it himself.

The future for al-Qaeda

Bin Laden's departure will only accelerate this democratising process. What little unifying power bin Laden still exerted has now been entirely removed. Indeed, his death deals a heavy blow to the old guard in "al-Qaeda central", and will probably empower loose affiliates who no longer feel the need to answer to anyone.  

Some groups, such as those in Pakistan, will continue the descent into nihilistic chaos, killing for killing's sake. Others, such as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, will remain primarily preoccupied with lashing out at the Algerian state. Still others, namely Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, will view this juncture as an opportunity to go back to basics.

Indeed, since its emergence in January 2009, AQAP has endeavoured to re-focus the jihad towards striking the west. Their most high-profile operations have been assaults on the US and British embassies in Sanaa, the bid by the "underpants bomber" to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, and the plot to explode cargo planes over western cities. The latest issue of their English-language magazine is dedicated to providing guidance on, and theological justifications for, attacks in the heart of the west.  

Certainly, US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki's star is rapidly ascending, precisely because of his fluency in English and his appeal among Muslims outside the region. He also takes bin Laden's subversion of Islamic authority to its logical extreme: on 8 November 2010 he stated that no fatwa or prior consultation with Islamic experts was necessary to "fight and kill Americans". If a western target is soon hit in revenge for the slaying of bin Laden, AQAP will be the prime suspect. Next on the list could be the Pakistani Taliban who, since last spring, have vowed to launch their own attacks inside western countries.

Losing the struggle

Though al-Qaeda will be temporarily re-energised by the killing of bin Laden, it will not be enough to build up the sort of momentum and broad-based sympathy that they enjoyed at the height of the US-led occupation of Iraq. Between 2003-2006 in particular, bin Laden's poetic narrative of resistance resonated even beyond the Muslim world. A German student in my halls at Oxford once returned from a trip home sporting a bin Laden t-shirt. George W Bush's "war on terror" did not win the struggle for hearts and minds – fortunately, however, al-Qaeda lost it.

Most of the victims of al-Qaeda related violence since 9/11 have been the Muslims of bin Laden's cherished umma. At the same time, the global jihad has been left twisting in the breeze of the Arab spring. An alternative, secular and pro-democracy discourse has emerged as a genuinely popular regional movement which is, crucially, bringing fast results - two tyrants and counting. At a time when millions of Arabs have taken to the streets to cry for freedom, development and the rule of law, al-Qaeda's worldview has never been more marginal, or marginalised. Before he died, the umma had stolen bin Laden’s thunder.

The covert operation to kill bin Laden confirmed two important points made by critics of Bush's war on terror. Firstly, it did not involve all-out-warfare against "enemy" nations. Instead, the surgical, intelligence-led operation was carefully conducted by special forces within a US-allied country. Secondly, the fact that bin Laden was hiding in a an affluent garrison town near Islamabad, a stone's throw from Pakistan's prestigious military academy, supports the long-held suspicion that elements within Pakistan's security establishment have been playing a double-game in the war on terror. These Islamic militants have been useful pawns in Pakistan's conflict with India, particularly over Kashmir, and they provide potential for strategic depth in Afghanistan. 

As for al-Qaeda, it can survive bin Laden's demise because it was designed to do so. Strategically, bin Laden's death was always assumed. The evolution, or devolution, into a diffuse network of affiliate groups guaranteed durability and provided significant tactical agility – but it has been catastrophic for the Muslims bin Laden needed to attract to his cause.

It is unlikely that the re-imagining of bin Laden in the wake of his death can re-invent al-Qaeda's track record of shameful and ultimately pointless bloodshed.  

Dr Alia Brahimi is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford.

Her work examines the moral justifications given for warfare, as well as jihadi ideology and strategy. Her latest book is Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror.

American power after Osama bin Laden......Joseph S Nye

When one state is preponderant in power resources, observers often refer to the situation as hegemonic. Today, many pundits argue that other countries' rising power and the loss of American influence in a revolutionary Middle East point to the decline of "American hegemony". But the term is confusing. For one thing, possession of power resources does not always imply that one can get the outcomes one prefers. Even the recent death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of United States special forces does not indicate anything about American power one way or the other.

To see why, consider the situation after World War II. The US accounted for more than one-third of global product and had an overwhelming preponderance in nuclear weapons. Many considered it a global hegemon. Nonetheless, the US was unable to prevent the "loss" of China, "roll back" communism in Eastern Europe, prevent stalemate in the Korean War, defeat Vietnam's National Liberation Front, or dislodge the Castro regime in Cuba.

Even in the era of alleged American hegemony, studies show that only one-fifth of America's efforts to compel change in other countries through military threats were successful, while economic sanctions worked in only half of all cases. Yet many believe that America's current preponderance in power resources is hegemonic, and that it will decline, like that of Britain before it. Some Americans react emotionally to that prospect, though it would be ahistorical to believe that the US will have a preponderant share of power resources forever.

Internal vs relative decline

But the term "decline" conflates two different dimensions of power: absolute decline, in the sense of decay or loss of ability to use one's resources effectively, and relative decline, in which the other states' power resources become greater or are used more effectively. For example, in the seventeenth century, the Netherlands flourished domestically but declined in relative power as other states grew in strength. Conversely, the Western Roman Empire did not succumb to another state, but instead to internal decay and swarms of barbarians. Rome was an agrarian society with low economic productivity and a high level of internecine strife.

While the US has problems, it hardly fits the description of absolute decline in ancient Rome, and the analogy to British decline, however popular, is similarly misleading. Britain had an empire on which the sun never set, ruled more than a quarter of humankind, and enjoyed naval supremacy. But there are major differences in the relative power resources of imperial Britain and contemporary America. By World War I, Britain ranked only fourth among the great powers in terms of military personnel, fourth in GDP, and third in military spending. The costs of defense averaged 2.5-3.4 per cent of GDP, and the empire was ruled in large part with local troops.

In 1914, Britain's net export of capital gave it an important financial kitty to draw upon (though some historians consider that it would have been better to have invested the money in domestic industry). Of the 8.6 million British forces in WWI, nearly one-third were provided by the overseas empire.

With the rise of nationalism, however, it became increasingly difficult for London to declare war on behalf of the empire, the defence of which became a heavier burden. By contrast, America has had a continental-scale economy immune from nationalist disintegration since 1865. For all the loose talk of American empire, the US is less tethered and has more degrees of freedom than Britain ever had. Indeed, America's geopolitical position differs profoundly from that of imperial Britain: while Britain faced rising neighbours in Germany and Russia, America benefits from two oceans and weaker neighbours.

The myth of decline

Despite these differences, Americans are prone to cycles of belief in decline. The Founding Fathers worried about comparisons to the decline of the Roman republic. Moreover, cultural pessimism is very American, extending back to the country's Puritan roots. As Charles Dickens observed a century and a half ago, "if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, [America] always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is in an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise."

More recently, polls showed widespread belief in decline after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, then again during the Nixon-era economic shocks in the 1970s, and after Ronald Reagan's budget deficits in the 1980s. At the end of that decade, American's believed the country was in decline; yet, within a decade, they believed that the US was the sole superpower. Now many have gone back to believing in decline.

Cycles of declinism tell us more about American psychology than about underlying shifts in power resources. Some observers, such as the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, believe that "debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time – it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policy makers and citizens." Ferguson believes that a doubling of public debt in the coming decade cannot erode US strength on its own, but that it could weaken a long-assumed faith in America's ability to weather any crisis.

Ferguson is correct that the US will have to come to terms with its budget deficit to maintain international confidence, but, as I show in my book The Future of Power, doing so is within the range of possible outcomes. America enjoyed a budget surplus only a decade ago, before George W. Bush's tax cuts, two wars, and recession created fiscal instability. The US economy is still ranked near the top in competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, and the political system, in its own messy way, has slowly begun to wrestle with the necessary changes.

Some believe a political compromise between Republicans and Democrats can be reached before the 2012 election; others suggest an agreement is more likely after the election. Either way, fuzzy statements about hegemonic decline would again prove misleading.

 

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is a professor at Harvard and author of The Future of Power.

The rights of Israel ........Joseph Massad

The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, now entering their twentieth year had been hailed from the start as historic, having inaugurated a "peace process" that would resolve what is commonly referred to as the "Palestinian-Israeli conflict". For the Palestinians and the international community, represented by the United Nations and the myriad resolutions its Security Council and General Assembly issued since 1948, what was to be negotiated were the colonisation of land, the occupation of territory and population, and the laws that stipulate ethnic and religious discrimination in Israel, which, among other things, bar Palestinian refugees from returning to their land and confiscate their property. In their struggle against these Israeli practises, Palestinian leaders, whether in Israel, the Occupied Territories, or the diaspora, have always invoked these rights based on international law and UN resolutions, which Israel has consistently refused to implement or abide by since 1948. Thus for the Palestinians, armed by the UN and international law, the negotiations were precisely aimed to end colonisation, occupation, and discrimination.

On the other hand, one of the strongest and persistent arguments that the Zionist movement and Israel have deployed since 1948 in defence of the establishment of Israel and its subsequent policies is the invocation of the rights of Israel, which are not based on international law or UN resolutions. This is a crucial distinction to be made between the Palestinian and Israeli claims to possession of "rights." While the Palestinians invoke rights that are internationally recognised, Israel invokes rights that are solely recognised at the national level by the Israeli state itself. For Zionism, this was a novel mode of argumentation as, in deploying it, Israel invokes not only juridical principles but also moral ones.

In this realm, Israel has argued over the years that Jews have a right to establish a state in Palestine, that they have a right to establish a "Jewish" state in Palestine, that this state has a "right to exist," and that it has a "right to defend itself", which includes its subsidiary right to be the only country in the region to possess nuclear weapons, that it has the "right" to inherit all the biblical land that the Jewish God promised it, and a "right" to enact laws that are racially and religiously discriminatory in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state, otherwise articulated in the more recent formula of "a Jewish and democratic state". Israel has also insisted that its enemies, including the Palestinian people, whom it dispossesses, colonises, occupies, and discriminates against, must recognise all these rights, foremost among them its "right to exist as a Jewish state", as a condition for and a precursor to peace.

Rights are non-negotiable

Israel began to invoke this right with vehemence in the last decade after the Palestine Liberation Organisation had satisfied its earlier demand in the 1970s and 80s that the Palestinians recognise its "right to exist". In international law, countries are recognised as existing de facto and de jure, but there is no notion that any country has a "right to exist", let alone that other countries should recognise such a right. Nonetheless, the modification by Israel of its claim that others had to recognise its "right to exist" to their having to recognise "its right to exist as Jewish state" is pushed most forcefully at present, as it goes to the heart of the matter of what the Zionist project has been all about since its inception, and addresses itself to the extant discrepancy between Israel's own understanding of its rights to realise these Zionist aims and the international community's differing understanding of them. This is a crucial matter, as all these rights that Israel claims to possess, but which are not recognised internationally, translate into its rights to colonise Palestinian land, to occupy it, and to discriminate against the non-Jewish Palestinian people.

Israel insists that these rights are not negotiable and that what it is negotiating about is something entirely different, namely that its enemies must accept all its claimed rights unequivocally as a basis to establish peace in the region and end the state of war. However, the rights that Israel claims for itself are central to what the Palestinians and the international community argue is under negotiation – namely, colonisation, occupation, and racial and religious discrimination. But these three practises, as Israel has made amply clear, are protected as self-arrogated rights and are not up for negotiations. Indeed they are central to the realisation of Israel's very definition. To negotiate over them would mean to nullify the notion of a "Jewish State". As this is the case, then what does Israel think the negotiations between it and the Palestinians have been all about since the Madrid peace conference inaugurated them in 1991? Let me revisit the history of these claims in order to understand Israel's point of view and make clear what the basis of the negotiations are.

Israel's rights and the historical record

The Zionist movement has often argued that establishing a Jewish State for world Jewry was a moral and historical necessity that must be protected and enshrined in law, something it tirelessly pursued over the decades. However, this did not mean that its foundational texts proceeded from this juridical or moral principle. Indeed in his two foundational texts, The State of the Jews and Old-New Land, Theodor Herzl, the "father" of Zionism, never invoked the notion of Jewish "rights" to argue for a state of and for the Jews, whether in Palestine or Argentina, the other location he proposed. Herzl did speak of a "solution" to the Jewish Question but not of a "right". And neither did the first Zionist Congress Herzl convened in 1897 and the Basel Program it issued, which did not cite such a "right". This also applies to the three international foundational texts that Zionism worked hard to bring about. The first such text, the Balfour Declaration, issued on 2 November 1917 by the British government, rather than use the language of rights used the language of affect, promising that the British government "views with favour" the establishment in Palestine of a "Jewish national home", and that its declaration was a "declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations". This was followed by the Mandate for Palestine, issued in 1922 by the Council of the League of Nations, which based itself on the Balfour Declaration, and also did not recognise any Jewish rights to a state or even to Palestine. What it did recognise was "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" as "the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country", again asserting like the Balfour Declaration before it, that this should not prejudice the "rights" of non-Jews. The third and more major text, the November 1947 Partition Plan resolution issued by the UN General Assembly proceeded from a moral preamble, namely, that the General Assembly considered "that the present situation in Palestine is one which is likely to impair the general welfare and friendly relations among nations" and hence the need to provide a "solution" to the "problem of Palestine". 

Israel's claims

Unlike these Zionist and international foundational documents which did not employ the language of rights, whether internationally recognised or self-arrogated, the Zionist movement insisted on its use in its own foundational document of the state, namely Israel's so-called "declaration of independence", formally titled "The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel". The declaration, which was signed by 37 Jewish leaders, 35 of whom were European colonists, and only one of whom was born in Palestine, misinforms us that "In the year… 1897… at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country." As the documentary record shows, however, neither Herzl nor the Zionist Congress proclaimed such a right at all.  Yet the "Declaration of Independence" proceeds to tell us that:

"This right was recognised in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home… On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable."

As none of these documents has affirmed such a right at all, the imputation to them that they did falls more in the realm of a Zionist investment in the new language of international relations within which the notion of rights became enshrined after World War II, not least in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This also coincided with the emergence of rights discourse in the same period as the hegemonic form of claim-making. Indeed, Israel's "Declaration of Independence" is so invested in this mode of argumentation that it invokes the European Enlightenment's notion of "natural" rights when it asserts in its preamble that "This right [to a Jewish State] is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State." The framers of the "declaration" conclude that "By virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of the Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel."

It is important here to point out that the logic of this document is its insistence that its invocation of the Jews' right to establish a Jewish state in Palestine has a clear legal and moral genealogy, of which it is merely the conclusion, and that such a right was finally granted "irrevocabl[y]" by the Partition Plan. That none of this was true did not deter the framers, who, in asserting a right they arrogated to themselves, were now instituting a mode of argumentation that would be the most powerful rhetoric in establishing Israeli facts on the ground. 

The meaning of the "Jewish State"

The United Nation's Partition Plan was a non-binding proposal that was never ratified or adopted by the Security Council, and therefore never acquired legal standing, as UN regulations require (although as far as the Palestinian people are concerned the United Nations had no right at any rate to partition what was not theirs to partition, much less to do so without the consultation of the Palestinian people themselves, thus denying them the right to self-determination). Nonetheless, it is important to consider what the Plan meant by "Jewish State" and "Arab State" due to the fact that the Israeli government uses this document as authorising its very establishment and subsequent policies. For Israel to rely on the Plan for its establishment and its policies, it would need to establish if the Plan proposed that the two states that would result from partition be exclusively Jewish and Arab demographically, or that their laws should grant rights to Jews or Arabs differentially and discriminate against non-Jews or non-Arabs. Expectedly, this was not the case. Even though Israel proceeded to institute a battery of racially and religiously discriminatory laws against its Palestinian Arab citizens (about 30 such laws exist at present), and set on to expropriate the large majority of lands in the country owned by Palestinian Arabs, the Partition Plan never proposed or authorised it to do so. The plan rather stated clearly that "No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex" (Chapter 2, Article 2) and that  "No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (by a Jew in the Arab State)… shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be said previous to dispossession." (Chapter 2, Article 8). When the Israeli "Declaration of Independence" was issued on May 14 1948, the Zionist forces had already expelled about 400,000 Palestinians from their lands and they would expel another 350,000 in the coming months. From this it follows clearly that not only is Israel's claim to establish a Jewish State that established demographic majority by ethnic cleansing was not authorised by the Partition Plan, but neither was its claim to be a Jewish state, in the sense of a state that privileges Jewish citizens over non-Jewish citizens legally and institutionally.

The proposed Partition Plan on which Israel bases its establishment initially envisioned a Jewish State with an Arab majority, which it later modified slightly to include 45 per cent Arab population and therefore it never envisioned it as free of Arabs or "Arabrein", as the Israeli state had hoped it would be and as many contemporary Israeli Jews contemplate today. Indeed as Palestine was divided into 16 districts, 9 of which were located in the proposed Jewish State, Palestinian Arabs were a majority in 8 of the 9 districts. Nowhere does the Partition Plan's use of the term "Jewish State" authorise ethnic cleansing or the colonisation of one ethnic group of the confiscated lands of another, especially as the Plan envisioned Arabs in the Jewish state to be a perpetual large "minority" and thus stipulated the rights that should be accorded to minorities in each state. But the fact that Arabs were a large minority and could conceivably, within a few years, have overtaken the Jewish population in the Jewish State remained uncontemplated by the Plan. For example, the Plan did not consider the consequences of the fact that if Jewish nationalism would define the Jewish State, how then could it accommodate almost half its population who had a different notion of nationalism and whom its excludes from its state nationalism a priori? And were the Palestinian Arabs in the Jewish State not adherents to Palestinian nationalism, they could not become, even if they so wished, Jewish nationalists, as they are excluded from Jewish nationalism ipso facto? How then could the Jewish State not discriminate against them?

This demographic situation would not have been a problem for the Arab State, as the Partition Plan envisioned that the Arab State would have a mere 1.36 per cent Jewish population. While the Zionist movement understood the contradictions of the Partition Plan and based on that understanding it set out to expel the majority of the Arab population of the projected Jewish State, they were unable to make the state Arabrein, which has complicated matters for them as time passed. Today over 22 per cent of Israel's population are Palestinian Arabs who are barred from inclusion in Jewish nationalism and suffer from institutionalised discrimination against them as non-Jews. Of course, had the state been Arabrein, there would not be a need for Israeli laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, including the Law of Return (1950), the Law of Absentee Property (1950), the Law of the State's Property (1951), the Law of Citizenship (1952), the Status Law (1952), the Israel Lands Administration Law (1960), the Construction and Building Law (1965), and the 2002 temporary law banning marriage between Israelis and Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. Here Zionists, including prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris, have argued that it is the very presence of Arabs in the Jewish State that propels the Jewish State to enshrine its racism in all these laws. Otherwise, had Israel succeeded in expelling all Palestinians, the only law it would have needed to preserve its Arabrein Jewish status would have been an immigration law stipulating it.

Ultimately then Israel's claimed right to set up a Jewish State translates immediately into the right of Jews to colonise the lands of the Palestinians, which necessitates the prior confiscation of their lands so that they can be colonised by Jews, the reduction of the number of Palestinians through expulsion and the enactment of laws that prevent their repatriation, and the neutralisation of the rights of those not expelled through institutional and legal discrimination.

Here it is important to stress that for the architects of the Partition Plan, a "Jewish State" meant a state ruled by Jewish nationalists who adhere to Zionism but whose population is almost half Palestinian Arabs whose lands cannot be confiscated for Jewish colonisation and who would have equal rights to Jews and not suffer any racial or religious discrimination. For Israel, the meaning of a "Jewish State" is quite different as it seems to mean the expulsion of a majority of the Arab population, a refusal to repatriate them, the confiscation of their land for the exclusive colonisation of Jews, and the enactment of discriminatory laws against those Palestinian Arabs who remained in the country. When Israel insists today that the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states recognise its right to be a Jewish state, they do not mean that they should recognise its Jewishness in the way the Partition Plan envisioned, but rather in the way Israel understands and exercises this definition on the ground. It is important to note in this regard that it remains unclear which meaning of "Jewish" president Obama (and president Bush before him) has in mind when he demands that Arabs and Palestinians must recognise Israel's right to be a Jewish state – the Partition Plan's sense or Israel's. 

The rights of the Palestinians

In contrast to Israel's invocation of rights that are not internationally sanctioned, the Palestinians invoke a number of internationally recognised rights that challenge Israel's self-arrogated rights. For example, Palestinians affirm their right to live in the Jewish State from which they were expelled, a right upheld by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which stated unequivocally that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country" -Article 13(2), and in the Fourth Geneva Conventions passed in 1949. Furthermore, the United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 resolved in 1949 "that the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." In 1974, UN General Assembly Resolution 3236, passed on 22 November 1974, declared the Palestinian right of return to be an "inalienable right". The right of refugees to return was also enshrined in 1976 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights when it stated that "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country" (Article 12).  Moreover, Palestinians cite the Partition Plan against Israel's confiscation of their lands for the exclusive use of Jewish colonisation as well as resolution 194 among other UN provisions against a state's confiscation of the land of a people based on ethnicity. Indeed, many Palestinians invoke the same legal instruments that Israel uses to reclaim the stolen and confiscated property of European Jews before World War II. Moreover, Palestinian civil society groups in Israel continue to challenge persistently Israel's racially discriminatory laws in Israeli courts, so far with little success.

The rights that Israel claims do not only affect Israel's Palestinian population and the Palestinian refugees living in the diaspora. Even though Israel's negotiations with the Palestinian Authority are said to address the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip only (and not East Jerusalem), it seems that these Israeli claimed rights also apply there. To begin with, Israel has insisted since 1967 that Jews have the right to colonise the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and that this is not a negotiable right. Indeed, to get its point across and to make sure it is not misunderstood, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel has more than tripled its Jewish colonial settler population in the West Bank and more than doubled it across the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, totalling approximately half a million colonists. Israel continues to confiscate West Bank Palestinian lands for colonising purposes and suppresses all Palestinian resistance to its colonisation. Moreover, and in addition to the continuing confiscation of Palestinian lands inside Israel, in East Jerusalem, and in the West Bank, Israel has extended it discriminatory laws and enacted new ones to privilege the colonising Jewish population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the Palestinian Arabs. This includes an apartheid-style separation between Arabs and Jews, including the construction of the Apartheid Wall, the construction of Jewish-only roads across the West Bank, and the differential access to water resources, never mind confiscated land, to Jewish colonists. The United Nations has invoked the fourth Geneva conventions and passed numerous resolutions (the most famous being UN Security Council resolution 446 passed in March 1979) calling on Israel to dismantle its Jewish colonial settlements and nullify its confiscation of lands to no avail.

Israeli leaders have maintained that their colonisation efforts did not detract from their moral commitment to peace. On the contrary, Israel is clear that it was the Palestinian Authority who is to blame for the cessation of negotiations. Current Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu is not only committed to negotiations, but he, like his predecessors, insists that the Palestinian Authority's protests that Jewish colonisation must stop for negotiations to begin is nothing short of an infringement on the rights of Israel, and an imposition of "pre-conditions" for negotiations, which he cannot accept.

On the question of the occupation and whether the negotiations are supposed to end it, Israel has maintained that its occupation of East Jerusalem, which it initially expanded twelve-fold (from 6 to 70 square kilometres) at the expense of West Bank lands (and which was more recently expanded to 300 square kilometres, encompassing a full 10 per cent of the West Bank) is permanent and that its occupation of the Jordan Valley and of another ten per cent of the West Bank that now lies to the west of the Apartheid Wall are also permanent. Israel insists that the negotiations are about a rearrangement of the nature of the occupation of what remains of the West Bank that could facilitate a form of autonomy for the Palestinians that would not include sovereignty but which it might be willing to call a "Palestinian State."

The recently Al Jazeera leaked Palestine Papers have shown that Palestinian Authority negotiators offered more concessions on all these fronts and, that despite such "flexibility", Israeli negotiators rejected all such offers. Indeed, Netanyahu has since the late 1990s insisted that the basis of the negotiations should no longer be the formula of "land for peace" but rather "peace for peace", affirming Israel's refusal to end its colonisation, occupation, or discrimination. More recently, he proposed that the negotiations be over "economic peace", wherein his commitment to peace is offered as a moral stance that safeguards Israel's self-arrogated juridical rights from being subject to negotiations.

As I have argued before, Zionism and Israel are careful not to generalise the principles that justify Israel's rights to colonise, occupy, and discriminate, but are rather vehement in upholding them as subsets of an exceptional moral principle. It is not that no other people has been oppressed historically, it is that Jews have been oppressed more. It is not that no other people's cultural and physical existence has been threatened; it is that the Jews' cultural and physical existence is threatened more. This quantitative equation is key to why the world, and especially Palestinians, should recognise that Israel needs and deserves to have the rights to colonise, occupy, and discriminate. If the Palestinians, or anyone else, reject this, then they must be committed to the annihilation of the Jewish people physically and culturally, not to mention that they would be standing against the Jewish God.

Negotiating the non-negotiable

Israel's right to defend itself means its right to safeguard its rights (to colonise Palestinian lands, occupy them, and discriminate against non-Jews) against any threats that could endanger these rights, foremost among them the threat of negotiations. Its right to defend itself is a right to uphold these rights and is therefore a subsidiary, if essential, right deriving from its right to be a Jewish state. The logic goes as follows: Israel has the right to colonise and occupy Palestinian land and to discriminate against Palestinians whether in Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries or in the additional territories it occupied in 1967, and if this population resists these measures and Israel responds with military violence causing massive civilian casualties, Israel would simply be "defending" itself as it must and should.

Informed by the European Enlightenment understanding of rights, especially John Locke's discussion of alienable versus inalienable rights, wherein, according to him, indigenous populations, in contrast with European colonists, lack such rights given that they live parasitically on the land and do not improve it, Israel's arrogation of these rights to itself entails its insistence that Palestinians, in line with Locke's assertions, possess no right to resist it. Thus, Israel's moral and juridical defence of itself are combined in this context, wherein Israel has the right to colonise and occupy the lands of the Palestinians, and to discriminate against them based on the principle of exceptionalism and European colonial supremacy, but wherein the Palestinians do not have the right to defend themselves against Israel's exercise of these self-arrogated rights, and were they to do so, Israel would then have the right to defend itself against their illegitimate defence of themselves against its legitimate and moral exercise of its own rights.

But if Israel has no internationally recognised juridical rights to colonise, occupy, or discriminate nor does it have a universally-sanctioned moral or juridical right to exceptionalism, then the only mechanism by which it is able to make such claims is the absence of international accountability, or more precisely its refusal to be accountable to international law and legal conventions. This refusal to be accountable is protected by its alliance with the United States, which vetoes all UN Security Council resolutions that call on Israel to be accountable to international law, thus rendering international law unenforceable. The most recent such veto was on February 11, 2011 when the Obama administration vetoed the resolution, supported by the other 14 members of the Security Council, calling on Israel to cease its colonisation of West Bank and East Jerusalem lands.

It is in this context that Israel and the US State Department (under Bush and Obama) have gone into high gear in recent years characterising Palestinians' resorting to legal mechanisms and international law to challenge Israel's so-called rights as "lawfare", which they are demanding be immediately stopped. These include a rejection by Israel of the 2002 decision by the International Court of Justice of the illegality of the Apartheid Wall it built in the West Bank, or the war crimes accusations that the UN-issued Goldstone Report levelled against Israel in its war on Gaza in 2008-2009. It is significant that the term "lawfare", which emerged a decade ago, is usually used to mean "the effort to conquer and control indigenous peoples by the coercive use of legal means." That Israel and the US equate the colonised Palestinians with a conquering power and the colonising Israeli Jews as indigenous testify to the serious concern over the danger that legal mechanisms of challenge constitute to Israel's so-called rights.

The discourse of rights, itself various and hardly agreed upon, ultimately has no jurisdiction, and takes place, or does not, in the negotiation (or non-negotiation) of political power. This is clearly manifested in Israel's continued insistence that its "rights" are non-negotiable. With the recent fall of the Egyptian regime and the more recent reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, it remains unclear how the Palestinian Authority (PA) will proceed. The PA plan to get one more recognition of a Palestinian State from the General Assembly next September, even if successful, will have very little substantial positive results and could very well have negative ones. Unless the PA suspends all negotiations and seeks international legal redress by mounting diplomatic pressure (especially from European and Arab states) on the US government to join the international consensus and stop vetoing international decisions, the rights of Israel will continue to be safeguarded.

What Israel has been negotiating over with the Palestinians is the form, the terms, and the extent to which Palestinians must recognise its rights without equivocation. It is this reality that has characterised the last two decades of negotiations with the Palestinians. Negotiations will never restore the internationally-recognised rights of the Palestinians; on the contrary, the negotiations that the Palestinians entered with Israel two decades ago are ones wherein one party, the Palestinians, must surrender all their internationally recognised rights and recognise instead Israel's self-arrogated rights, which are not recognised by international law or any other country for that matter. Sixty-three years after the establishment of the Jewish settler-colony, this Palestinian act will not only lend the first international legitimacy to Israeli claims, it will constitute in effect nothing less than the first international recognition of Israel's self-arrogated rights. Israel need give up nothing in return.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

The end of an ideology..........Roger Cohen

Osama bin Laden is dead — and so is an old Middle East. That they died together is fortuitous and apt.

Bin Laden lived to propel history backward to the reestablishment of a Muslim caliphate. He died a marginal figure to the transformation fast-forwarding the Arab world toward pluralism and self-expression.

He came of age as the Arab world shifted from Nasserite nationalism to the discovery of identity in political Islamism. It was a potent form of anti-Western defiance. His death comes as post-Islamist revolutions from Tunis to Cairo topple despotism in the name of democratic values long denied Arabs, who, in their vast majority, now seek a reasonable balance between modernity and their faith. Arab pride has disentangled itself from the complex of the West.

Bin Laden’s Holy War drew sustenance from “Westoxification” — the sense of humiliation among Arabs at perceived Western dominance and aggression. Bin Laden whipped that resentment into al-Qaeda’s capacity for nihilistic mass murder.

He died as Arabs en masse move away from the politics of rage and revenge, directed mainly outward, toward a new politics of responsibility and representative government, directed mainly inward.

It is not only the timing of his death at the hands of US forces that is apt, but also its location — far from a Middle East with which he had lost touch. He died in Pakistan. Or rather he died in the so-called Af-Pak theatre where a decade of war has fed jihadist ideology even as it has lost appeal for Web-savvy Arab youth in the region of its birth. 

An era has passed. It was a painful decade of disorientation and American whiplash. The mass murder so agonising it had to be distilled to three digits — 9/11 — poisoned a new century at its outset. Bin Laden was that poison’s slow drip.

I was in New York City that day, at the bottom of Atlantic Avenue, by the East River, when a guy next to me said, “Hey, look, the World Trade Centre’s on fire.” So, on a clear day, began the pulverising horror that turned human beings to dust and shook Americans’ most basic assumptions about the land that morphed into a “homeland.”

Today I’m in Benghazi, where brave Libyans determined to forge a decent society battle an Arab despot, Muammar Gaddafi, the sometime terrorist and slayer of Americans who then claimed anti-Qaeda credentials to secure the support of the West. In fact, of course, his tyranny, which must end, has fed the very extremism he claimed to oppose. Bin Laden thrived on Arab despotism and on the American hypocrisy involved in supporting that repression. 

He died as President Obama’s America has made democratisation in the Arab world at least a semi-serious US objective for the first time. Effective counterterrorism does not lie in starving a whole region of basic rights. That much has been learned.

There is hope in this passage from the suicidal Arab rage of 9/11 to the brave resistance of Libya’s 2/17 Benghazi revolution — and the other revolutions and uprisings sweeping the region. A long road is left to travel — al-Qaeda is not dead — but the first step was the hardest: the breaking of the captive Arab mind, the triumph of engagement over passivity, the defeat of fear. Bin Laden’s rose-tinged caliphate was the solace of the disenfranchised, the disempowered and the desperate. A young guy with a job, a vote and prospects does not need virgins in paradise. 

America initially nourished bin Laden’s ideology as a means to defeat the Soviet empire, before becoming its target. Neglect and end-of-history euphoria preceded devastating blowback. In the decade since then, there has been further blowback — from two punishing wars and from mistaken policy.

This is a triumphant day for a young American president who changed policy, retiring his predecessor’s horrible misnomer, the Global War on Terror or GWOT, in order to focus, laser-like, on the terrorists determined to do the United States and its allies harm. Bin Laden had enticed George W. Bush’s flailing America into his web. Obama saw the need for extraction and engagement — extraction from the wars and engagement with the moderate Muslim majority.

The passage has been uneven but his achievements unquestionable. Open societies have this going for them over circles of fanatical conviction: they learn from mistakes. 

How then to complete the work and make a corpse not only of bin Laden but his movement? Oust Gaddafi with ruthlessness and in short order. Steer the Arab revolutions into port with consistent political support and funding. Arab democracy must also mean Arab opportunity.

End the war in Afghanistan as soon as America’s basic security requirements are met. Make America’s closest regional ally, Israel, understand that a changed Middle East cannot be met with unchanging Israeli policies. Palestine, like Israel, must rise to the region’s dawning post-Osama era of responsibility and representation.

The 2012 campaign just got less interesting. Obama, as I’ve written before, is a lucky man. I suspect luck and purposefulness do a two-term president make. Obama got Osama because he turned a wider tide.

The Osama we knew........... Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In death, as in life, Osama bin Laden will be over-interpreted. His crimes are easily described. He masterminded an extraordinary network that was responsible for some audaciously murderous acts of terror. There is no adequate moral framework in which to comprehend his death. There will perhaps be some closure for the families who suffered immeasurably by what he unleashed. But whether the terms of justice or revenge measure up to the sheer convulsions he unleashed is an open question.

Osama became a force, far in excess of the violence he unleashed, fundamentally transforming our world. Ideologically, he created an extraordinary churning in the Muslim world: a potent combination of inner-directed resentment, violent fervour and anti-imperialism. He fought his own reactionary milieu with an unprecedented fanaticism. He challenged the established order and produced a crisis of authority inside Islam. When the entire world was putting its weight and force of arms behind reactionary regimes like Saudi Arabia, he created his own geopolitical convulsions. In an age that prized the nation state, he spawned a violent global movement. He became everything: an agent, an idea, an ideology, a pretext. These ideological effects, as far-reaching as they were, will not endure. The Americans may have killed bin Laden. But the ideology he unleashed will die if the democratic revolutions in the Arab world succeed in full measure. His greatest ideological nightmare, modernity, has an uncanny way of reasserting itself. 

But his enduring effect is more subtle. He redefined the way in which we think of power in the modern world. A small group using violence and artfully manipulating the media could create disproportionate effects on a scale unimaginable. He was never going to defeat the power of liberalism ideologically. But he managed to transform liberal practice for the worst. Freedom in liberal states now comes against a backdrop of surveillance, militarisation, suspicion and human rights compromises. This legacy will take a long time to undo, if ever. 

What will be the consequences of his death? The immediate consequence is a much-needed boost for President Obama. It will come as a much-needed palliative for American pride that was being relentlessly dented in all quarters. And the first rule of international politics is that psychological effects are more far-reaching than any assessment of interests. The politics behind Osama has always been even more shadowy than his movements were. There is still no reckoning of the forces that supported him and used him. Just the circumstances of his death, barely 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, should leave no one in any doubt that he was, all these years, being politically used and protected by the ISI in Pakistan. The US has, for more than a decade, been either unbelievably gullible or ominously cynical in relation to Pakistan. In a curious way, Osama’s death only deepens the mystery of US and Pakistani conduct; it does not resolve it.

But future events turn on two questions. If the ISI was using him in life, what are their calculations about his death? Did he die because his protectors now found his death convenient? Or did he die despite his protectors? The US will have to play this narrative very delicately. The one thing you know about the ISI establishment is that it is very good at playing heads we win, tails you lose. If this operation is seen in any way as a humiliation for the ISI, it will get its back. Nothing is more dangerous than the core Pakistani establishment licking its wounds. And the one thing Osama has taught us is this: there is no force more lethal than the sense of being wounded. If the ISI was in on it, it will extract its pound of flesh. 

How his death is represented is going to be crucial in determining future politics. Some argue that his death exposed Pakistan’s complicity; others that it demonstrates their cooperation with the West. But whether Pakistan was duplicitous or cooperative will probably not matter much. It will remain indispensable for the US for two reasons. First, if this allows the US to claim victory and hasten a withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan will remain important even in a post-withdrawal scenario. Second, Osama’s death will not do away with the most important pretext for heavy US adjustment towards Pakistan: the blackmail that nuclear weapons may fall into the wrong hands. Unless the US calls Pakistan’s bluff on this proposition, its hands remain tied.

The second question is this: what impact will Osama’s death have on radical militant groups and movements, both inside and outside Pakistan? The short answer is: probably very little. Many of the terrorist groups have been sustained by the support of some state or the other. Those geo-political considerations that lead the states to support some groups are not likely to diminish. Or rather they will diminish only for other larger considerations. In the case of Pakistan the core question still remains: Osama or no Osama, does the support of terror groups still constitute a core of the Pakistani state’s strategic orientation towards both Afghanistan and India? Second, radical politics, such as it exists, is shaped by larger social and political forces. To what extent does al-Qaeda remain an important inspiration? All accounts seem to suggest, not very much. But Osama’s death is probably going to allow for a little bit of ideological clearing. Instead of an ideological construction of a single war on terror, we will now place different groups more firmly in their geopolitical and social settings. It will be harder to personify all terrorism behind a single face. 

The regime in Pakistan still has to handle two delicate political issues. The point about large terror networks, like civil wars, is this. Once structures of violence have been put in place they don’t simply disappear. Some will doubtless try acts of revenge to polarise politics further. But the second question is the degree of political blow-back inside Pakistan. I think it is fair to say that there is probably not much popular support for Osama at this point; the chances of a popular backlash are remote. But if the sense grows that Pakistan is being humiliated in the aftermath of this attack, then the psychological dynamics of politics could change. This is where the politics of representation will be important.

Osama may be gone. His tactics made him impossible to deal with in political terms. Whether his death will leave us politically wiser is an open question. 

.
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.

End of Terror.....................

I get a message from my friend in the early morning  that Osama Bin Laden being killed in an early morning/nighttime surprise raid. Social media have been buzzing on the overdrive since the time the news leaked out. Lots and lots of questions and no answers.Speculations. Controversies. Issues. Unbelievable and difficult to believe that one of the major instigators of  terrorist acts is no more.

Amongst the major surprises was the  discovery of the fact that OBL was hiding out in a mansion near the military training academy, on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan. Though there were rumors always that he was hiding out somewhere in the Af-Pak boundary, this event confirms it in a rather shocking manner.  The question rises then how was he hidden from public view so successfully? And how could the administration be unaware of his residence?

The  meticulousness of the attack indicates it was well and extensively planned and surprisingly kept under wraps.Till it occured, there was not an inkling in the air that OBL was in residence in the area, Abbottabad.  President Obama in his speech clearly states that the operation was entirely and completely an US organised operation and does not involve the Pak govt in anyway.  Reports by various agencies indicate the role of  a specialised american team  in this task.

DNA analysis has confirmed that the body was that of OBL. Further there are conflicting reports on whether the body has been buried or not. Which raises the question of why the body has not been displayed for the media?

The most important question, in my view, is how it would impact the current terrorist movements across globe. It is possible that there may be a vicious return attack or resurgence in terrorist activities, directed against the US and its allies. It may also have a negative effect on the morale of terrorists and their supporters. In either case, it is too early to assume that terrorism will die out. This is just one OBL. What about the many undiscovered OBLs out there ? For the U.S., this is of significance because it comes as justice for the September 2001 attacks and wll bring in a sense of closure for the people who are still suffering the aftermath. The tone of the statement of Pres Obama indicates it as an entirely US centric exercise- for the US people but how does the rest of the world benefits from this or would they benefit in any way? Is it  fruitful or useful for the rest of the world to celebrate this ? A question somebody highlighted in twitter is the impunity with which the US conducted this exercise. Does it not ring alarm bells for people who look to the US for support and aid? Events in the middle east also raises questions about western interventions for a cause,outside of them, being really  helpful in the long term

Important questions for countries which are victims of terrorism as to how to deal with terrorists and supporters of terrorists. There are no easy ways to deal with them. If you are eager to listen to them, you are considered too soft and if you dont listen to them at all, you are considered as hardline.  How do you achieve a balance? At the same time, it is very important to reassure the citizens that you are serious about defending your country and standing up to terrorists. Nothing should compromise the country’s security.

As for Pakistan, a lot of hard questions and soul searching should be carried out but whether it is done or not is another matter. Itself being a victim of some vicious attacks and assassinations in recent times, this episode has put its leadership (government, military, intelligence) in a spot in its own eyes as well as the eyes of the world community.

The coming few days will bring about a spate of theories, denials, corroborations, exaggerations etc. What is true may be a miniscule substance in the spate of information coming out and has to be taken with a measured sense of scepticism. And the aftereffects of this event has to be awaited out.