Jihad is not dead

The terrorist has been killed. The American forces and their political leadership deserve to be commended for achieving a long-standing goal. Osama bin Laden was the most potent symbol of the ideology of terror in the name of Islam, and its destruction is, indeed, a severe setback for the movement.

However, the ideology of terror he championed lives on, in multiple organisations and individuals, in different parts of the world; and, in an attempt to prove that a symbol’s fall does not mean defeat of what it stood for, Al-Qaeda and its ideological affiliates are likely to stage reprisal attacks around the world. If India needs to be vigilant, Pakistan has to be doubly vigilant.

The Pakistani establishment finds itself not just discredited, but in double jeopardy. It is improbable that Osama bin Laden could have sheltered himself in a huge mansion with barbed-wiremounted 17-ft walls in one of Islamabad’s poshest suburbs without the Pak authorities’ knowledge and consent . This makes the Pak establishment — the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, more than the civilian government — deeply complicit in the eyes of all those fighting terror. Complicity is what terrorists now suspect the Pak establishment of, too, in the American attack that killed Bin Laden, despite express American and Pak denials.

After losing the trust of terrorism’s foes and facing the fury of betrayed terror groups, Islamabad will come under pressure to abandon the strategy of using terror for added strategic reach. Its only hope out of a spiralling descent into chaos is genuine democracy, in which real power is transferred from the armed forces to genuine representatives of the people, not a handful of elite families who assume a congenital right to rule. Islamic radicalism was inspired as much by the absence of democracy in the core Islamic countries led by Saudi Arabia, and of peaceful yet meaningful protest, as by anything else. Success of the ongoing movements for democracy in the Arab world is the only way to disarm and deflate the ideology of jihad. And that would include a democratic Saudi Arabia and a sovereign Palestine that secures the safety of Israel as well.