Bin Laden Won, but He Really Lost

It’s hard not to be a little emotional today after hearing the news that a team of Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden in a raid on his Pakistani compound last night.  Not because revenge is sweet, it isn’t, it’s almost always hollow when it comes to death.  We didn’t gain anything tangible when we woke up this morning.

It’s emotional because this is a big psychological victory for America.  Strategically it means little.  But psychologically this is such an important event.  As a sports fanatic, someone who has played both hockey and tennis at the highest junior levels, and a market participant who’s strategy is largely based on understanding the psychology of market participants through technical analysis, I know how important emotional wins can be, even when they are not strategically important.

It’s hard to argue that Bin Laden didn’t accomplish one of his largest goals, to drag America into a long drawn out war in the Middle East.  He won largely because he understood us better than we understood ourselves as a nation and a culture.  He won by laying one of the greatest defense in depth traps of all time.  For those unfamiliar with this military strategy, the best and most clear example comes from World War II when the Russians allowed the Nazis to penetrate deep into their territory in the middle of the winter knowing that they would be overstretched and weak.  The Russians then cut off the supply lines and massacred the Nazis.  Defense in depth is an extremely important tactic, not because it is tactically difficult to defend against, but because it is strategically difficult to avoid.

Bin Laden was a strategic genius.  He lured the greatest military force ever assembled across the globe into the desert and mountains of Afghanistan to chase ghosts.  He understood better than we did that no empire has ever escaped from an occupation of Afghanistan intact.  He understood that human capital intensive wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia would bleed us dry, of treasure and honor.  These wars did not cost us much blood in comparison to past wars of the 20th century, but that wasn’t Bin Laden’s aim.  He understood that there was no way for us to win in Afghanistan through military means.  He understood that he would sap the collective will of the American people to engage in his theater of conduct.  After all, Bin Laden’s goal and gripe was never with the American people, although he like many other militant Islamists do not make the distinction between regular citizen and military personnel due to the fact that we support the military through our taxes, he simply wanted us out of the Middle East so that he could turn back the clock to the 10th century on those people.  No doubt a terrible goal, but surely one that we often misunderstood.  He believed that if America was defeated, globalization would ground to a halt.

Bin Laden played his hand perfectly.  We are now a country of Islamaphobes.  We’ve been bled dry by these wars.  We’ve done morally reprehensible things that go against our values as a nation.  And worse, we displayed the inability to think strategically regarding a group of transnational terrorists hiding in caves.  Instead of matching the correct strategy to fit the problem, we acted rash and emotionally.  We labeled this “The War On Terror” because our adversaries used terrorism as a tactic.  We’re now caught up chasing ghosts all over the world trying to prevent “terrorism” without explaining to our population the root cause of our adversary’s desire to harm us.  We tell our people that we can beat “terrorism” or the “terrorists” when that is an impossible goal.  Language means a lot, it structures our way of thinking, using the wrong words can often lead to having misguided views.

But Osama Bin Laden made one grave miscalculation.  He did not understand that globalization was an unstoppable force that would march around this earth whether he liked it or not, whether he brought down “The American Empire” or not.  He held the view that globalization was American, it wasn’t, it was a natural outcome of a technological revolution in the sharing of information.  The world was getting smaller, he wanted it to be bigger.  Bin Laden was fighting against an unstoppable force, and he was destine to lose.  His ideal society where people are kept in the dark as to other cultures around the world, other views on religion, modern technology, modern scientific thought, this was a pipe dream.  It’s a pipe dream for every person throughout the world that believes they can throw a veil of ignorance over the eyes of someone else.

Radical militant Islam was a natural reaction to a world which was infringing on long held religious and cultural beliefs of a large set of people trapped in the past.  We didn’t help our cause for a long time in dealing with this issue, propping up corrupt dictators who slaughtered their people.  We helped produce Osama Bin Laden and thousands of other radical Islamists, there’s no way around that truth.  Does that make their cause right, not a chance in hell, but that doesn’t absolve us from some blame in making it worse.  Radical militant Islam was an unavoidable outcome of a religion and culture stuck in the past clashing with modernity, openness and human rights.  Bin Laden was destine to lose from the beginning because we were not the creators of globalization, we just kick started it.  Bin Laden was destine to lose because the world is getting less ignorant every day through connectivity, religion becomes less important as science is able to explain more of our existence, and as people grow wealthier and have more to live for in this life instead of the next.  Bin Laden and every radical religious leader is fighting a losing battle.

2011 had already been an incredibly bad year for Osama Bin Laden and anyone who ascribed to radical militant Islam.  The government in Tunisia fell by way of massive secular protests against a corrupt government.  It did not fall by way of a theocratic revolution.  The Egyptian government, long a sore point for Bin Laden, also fell, by way of massive secular protests, not an Islamic revolution.  It must have been horrible for Bin Laden to watch this take place, his goal of overthrowing the Egyptian government for so long, done by the people he hates the most, the secular worldly generation crying out to join the rest of the modern world, it’s very ironic.  Now Libya, Yemen, Morocco seem ready as well, Syria is a mess.  Assad’s father massacred 20,000 people in the town of Hama for being Islamic radicals, Bin Laden had a pretty big gripe with him as well.  He won’t get to watch Assad’s son be disposed of by secular protesters who want to bring Syria into the modern world as well, not back into the 10th century.  So very ironic.

The whole region is about to enter the modern world, not because we as Americans are forcing them to with our culture or our military, but because it was destine to happen given a shrinking world.  The second those planes hit the towers, our goal should have been to have a conversation as a nation about who these people were and why they hated us.  It should have dealt with the reality that we live in a quickly changing world which is displacing many people’s beliefs.  It should have dealt with the fact that terrorism is a tactic, and you can’t eradicate a tactic of war.  Our first instinct should not have been to rush off to war without any kind of strategy of our own.  Yes that’s tough to hear, and I am certainly not a pacifist, I’m a pragmatist, there is a time and place for massive war and destruction.  This wasn’t it, because no amount of destruction, no amount of killing was going to solve this problem.  The backlash by radical Islam against globalization can only be defeated by force feeding these people with information, until they are blue in the face with envy at the rest of the world.  Terrorism is a means to and end, it was not the end we needed to be fighting.  Yes we need to protect our citizens by using our military and intelligence services to kill those who pose a direct threat.  But marching around the world with a heavy foot print believing that we can kill each and every terrorists where they live was an asinine strategy, one that has left us fiscally and morally broken.

Bin Laden was an unspeakably horrible person who used some of the most despicable tactics you can think of.  His killing is a moral victory, and everyone involved should be commended.  I hope his death will give political cover to the administration to bring our boys home from the deserts and the mountains, and to fight this backlash against globalization through connectivity, the only way it will be successfully dealt with.  Kill them through connectivity, not bullets.  A fiber optic line can kill so many more bad ideas than a bullet ever will.

Bin Laden won, but he really lost.

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