Bin Laden’s death: Fact or fiction?

So bin Laden is dead — or is he? Where’s the body, where’s the proof? And did he die last week, last year, five years ago? Of a bullet wound, of kidney failure, at the hands of Americans or at the hands of his own guards? Conspiracies hit the web shortly after the news broke that bin Laden was killed at a compound in Abbottabad. My hyper-educated cohort was not immune — conspiracies flashed across my Facebook feed in numerous status updates and bad puns about ‘fishy’ burials at sea.

It’s no secret that all governments keep secrets. Sometimes these secrets are necessary for national security. Sometimes these secrets are revealed, and they are understandable or sinister or both. But always, a government’s secrets serve to promote its ideology and institutional platform. I can’t figure out how the US government would benefit from staging bin Laden’s death, which is why I think bin Laden is truly, recently, dead.

The most common theory seems to be that Obama’s cabinet masterminded an elaborate tale of bin Laden’s death to boost Obama’s approval ratings prior to November 2012’s presidential elections. But why off bin Laden a year-and-a-half early? Unless this event significantly destabilises al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations, unless it eases disentanglement from Afghanistan, no one will be thinking about bin Laden as they cast their vote for the candidate that promises affordable health care, better employment and a return to American industry. Barring another large terrorist attack on American soil, national security is probably low on most voters’ lists. (By the way, those street parties in New York and Washington DC? That was simply university kids moving the bar scene to the block, just because they could. Please compare to post-Superbowl/World Series celebrations.)

The fact that bin Laden was shot in the head rather than taken alive indicates that, despite media statements to the contrary, the US government considered his influence significantly weakened in the past few years. If the government thought he had information beyond his laptop, most likely bin Laden would still be breathing. Of course, one theory is that the US has captured and is gleefully torturing bin Laden at this moment. If that were the case, why publish his death at all? An explanation could easily be fabricated for a raid on a compound in Abbottabad. Explanations are fabricated all the time.

Perhaps the Obama administration delivered bin Laden on the 8^th anniversary of Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ speech to simultaneously taunt the former administration and somehow justify the fact that, not only has it barely deviated from Bush’s foreign policy, but thousands more civilians have died under Obama’s watch. Or maybe the announcement was meant to distract from the fact that last month American forces bombed Libya without congressional approval. But the Americans who actually care about munitions tactics in Libya aren’t that gullible, and I’m sure the administration realises this.

Relations have been strained between the US and Pakistan, and bin Laden’s prolonged presence near Pakistan’s capital has only complicated the situation. Flashing the ‘Osama trump card’ for leverage wouldn’t have benefited either country. If Pakistani intelligence knew about bin Laden (and I strongly suspect that somebody knew), he wasn’t handed over as an easy diplomatic bandage. More likely, American intelligence discovered bin Laden’s presence on its own and Islamabad had to play dumb — but not dumb enough to lose civilian faith. Pakistan’s position has become increasingly perilous here, since there’s no way for the country to emerge as both militarily competent and earnest in the global fight against terrorism.

Theorists worldwide should quit debating the possibility of bin Laden’s death and start debating what the certainty of his death means, if anything, for this increasingly elusive war on terror and for US relations with Iraq, Afghanistan and, most directly, Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2011.