Terrorism and trash
A RECENT cover of Time magazine predictably bore a picture of Osama bin Laden with a red cross painted across his face, one of many such offerings available at American news-stands. This is hardly surprising.
The surreptitious and hard-won victory scored by the United States in Abbottabad was a coup by any account, the cornering of an enemy whose elusiveness had sunk American egos for nearly a decade. Preceded in kind by victorious conquerors of centuries past, America’s effusive backslapping, ever expected and predictably overblown, is part of what the world expects from the land of cowboys.
What constitutes cause for concern are the myriad details that pad the narrative presented in Time’s story and that have been regurgitated by numerous other American television and print outlets. Among these is the issue of trash, specifically burning trash, normally an ignored and unconsidered factor in the solemn soliloquies dissecting the motives of this or that terrorist.
The Time story says: “A pit in the yard was used for burning household trash, leaving nothing for snooping garbage collectors”: an innocuous statement slyly insinuating, as FOX, CNN and others have been doing, that an overwhelming catalogue of suspicious activity — such as the burning of trash — should have alerted either the military academy next door, or the neighbours who should have been nosier. At the very least, it ought to have alerted the imagined garbage collectors whose careers were presumably going up in smoke inside the compound. Having digested simply too many of these trash-based speculations that seem to have taken even the Time correspondent hostage, I must offer here the embarrassing truth, one attested by the mountains of refuse that burn in nearly every Pakistani neighbourhood. Pakistan has few trash collectors; we burn our trash all the time, contributing simultaneously to climate change and now perhaps to global terrorism.
In the pre-Bin Laden death era, they signified helplessness before one’s own filth and a sorry, troubling deficiency of civic sense; now, apparently, they signify so much more.
The tragedies of terror do not of course end with trash alone. The euphoria-induced misunderstandings in the US continue to give rise to the insistence that in inadequately choreographing his end, Bin Laden gave away previous victories of propaganda.
This was hinted at in the first post-Bin Laden afterglow when various members of the Obama administration referred to Bin Laden’s abode as a “million-dollar mansion”, a departure from the cave where he had been thought to be living.
This existing refrain of Bin Laden’s spiffy new digs is also addressed in the Time story, which celebrates it by asserting that the leader of Al Qaeda, so attentive in presenting himself as a fighting man’s hero, camouflage and all, would undoubtedly have balked at having been discovered in a fortified compound with a “king-size bed and much younger wife”.
The image has been ruined is the glib pronouncement, Bin Laden’s ascetic sham exposed before watching Pakistanis.
Such optimism can only belong to the newly victorious or those who have never waited hours in the sweltering heat for the passage of a VIP convoy on the streets of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad or, really, anywhere in Pakistan.
It is the giddy cheerfulness of those whose government can issue $500 stimulus cheques, whose politicians must reveal their tax returns and where the president earns less money than some physicians.
Amid the smoke of burning trash, Pakistan’s leaders — civilian or military — are icons of splendour and live in homes whose resplendence could well leave the White House looking shabby.
Against this lavish milieu, the shabby details of the Bin Laden family enable the same seduction orchestrated by his extreme warrior poses. The squalid compound, the kerosene stove in a corner, the plastic bucket, are now quite entrenched in the mental firmament of Pakistanis, used to weeping helplessly before the excess of their elites.
Where Americans — whose enjoyment of physical security almost never necessitates the construction of walls around their homes — see a million-dollar mansion, Pakistanis whose perceptions are more crucial to the fight against terror see a contrast in the existing culture of wealth and leadership that surrounds them.
They see a man who had a $50m bounty on his head but was protected by no army of lethal guards, enjoyed no silk sheets and brocade curtains, not even perhaps the one comfort that separates Pakistan’s haves from its have-nots: air-conditioning.
This collection of misunderstandings, new additions to an already macabre collage, tell the story of two countries culturally and strategically at odds but forced to coexist in an unhappy, loveless marriage.
The US wants very much to believe that the death of Osama is a victory — not simply a symbolic one but a deeply meaningful rout whose consequences will forever debilitate terrorism and its cheerleaders. Invested in this project that sees defeating terror as a mathematical calculation where goals are concrete and coordinates certain, the elimination of a figure as central as Bin Laden is graphed as the path whose dividends can be predicted and hence celebrated.
In the land of burning trash, very little is certain. Truth is varied and terror is seen to reside as much in imperialism as in the blown-up bodies of suicide bombers.
It is not easy to see the world through Pakistan’s eyes; it is a gray landscape where good and evil evade clarity and where old wounds resurrect themselves in new, debilitating ailments. What must be done to make the government accountable, how to create transparent institutions, what to do about a culture of corruption, how to defeat utopian visions imposing a literal, power-hungry, Islam … these questions languish in the minds of this population aching for answers and haunted by the taunt of repeated failures.
Most Americans have never visited Pakistan, so their ignorance regarding its garbage-disposal practices are perhaps excusable; what is not is the wilful inability to imagine a world where terror’s tentacles are varied and visceral and where the heady giddiness of victory is a luxury few can afford.
The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.