Washington has achieved nothing of tactical or strategic value. Indeed, the bombing, which has taken the lives of many civilians, has worsened the US’ strategic position in Southwest and South Asia by eroding the stability of the pro-US regimes in the Muslim world.

A radical fundamentalist regime is now a real possibility in Islamabad, while Washington faces the unpleasant prospect of having to serve ultimately as a police force between an increasingly isolated Saudi elite and a restive youthful population that regards bin Laden as a hero.

Meanwhile in the rest of the developing world, the shock over the September 11 assault is giving way to disapproval of the US bombing and, even more worrisome to Washington, to bin Laden’s emergence in the public consciousness as a feisty underdog skilfully running circles around a big bully who only knows one response: massive retaliation.
Clearly Washington and London are losing the propaganda war. Their effort to paint the military campaign as a conflict between civilisation and terrorists has instead come across as a crusade of the Anglo-Saxon brotherhood against the Islamic world. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public relations drive to make Britain an equal partner in the war effort has been so jarring that the foreign minister of Belgium, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, has felt compelled to criticise Blair for compromising the interests of the EU.

A number of writers have theorised that the September 11 attack might have been intended to lure the US into a war of intervention in the Middle East that would inflame the Muslim world against it. Whether or not that was the case, the US bombing of Afghanistan has created precisely such a situation. Moderate leaders of Thailand’s normally sedate Muslim community now openly express support for bin Laden. In Indonesia, once regarded as a model of tolerant Islam, a recent survey revealed that half of the respondents regard bin Laden as a fighter for justice and less than 35 per cent regard him as a terrorist.

The global support that US President George Bush has flaunted is deceptive. Of course, a lot of governments would express their support for the UN Security Council’s call for a global campaign against terrorism, but when one gets down to the decisive criterion of offering troops and weapons to fight alongside the British and the Americans, one is down to the hardcore Western Cold War alliance.

The September 11 attacks were horrific and heinous, but from one angle, what were they but a variant of Che Guevara’s “foco” theory? For Guevara, the aim of a bold guerrilla action is twofold: to demoralise the enemy and to empower your popular base by getting them to participate in an action that shows that the all-powerful government is indeed vulnerable. The enemy is then provoked into a military response that further saps his credibility in what is basically a political and ideological battle. For bin Laden, terrorism is not the end but a means to an end. And that end is something that none of Bush’s rhetoric about defending civilisation through revenge bombing can compete with: a vision of Muslim Asia rid of the American economic and military power and corrupt surrogate elites and returned to justice and Islamic sanctity.

Yet Washington was not exactly weaponless in this ideological war. It could have responded to the September 11 attacks in a way that might have blunted bin Laden’s political and ideological appeal and opened up a new era in US-Arab relations. First, it could have foresworn unilateral military action and announced to the world that it would go the legal route in pursuing justice, combining patient multinational investigation, diplomacy, and the employment of accepted international mechanisms like the International Court of Justice. These methods take time but they work.

Then the US could have announced a broad change in its policies in the Middle East; the withdrawal of troops from Saudi Arabia, the ending of sanctions and military action against Iraq, decisive support for the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, and ordering Israel to immediately refrain from attacks on Palestinian communities. Had the US taken this route, instead of taking the law – as usual – into its own hands, it could have emerged as an example of a Great Power showing restraint and paved the way to a new era of relations among people and nations.

The instincts of a unilateral, imperial past, however, have prevailed to such an extent that the rights of dissent and democratic diversity that have been one of the powerful ideological attractions of US society are fundamentally threatened by law-and-order types like Attorney General John Ashcroft, who are taking advantage of the current crisis to push through their pre-September 11 authoritarian agendas.
Washington has put itself in a no-win situation. If it kills bin Laden, he becomes a martyr. If it captures him alive, freeing him will become an intense focus for the Muslim resistance, while capital punishment would be effectively prevented by the likelihood it would set off massive revolts throughout the Muslim world. If it fails to kill or capture him, he will secure an aura of invincibility, as somebody favoured by God and whose cause is therefore just. Ironical and perverse as this may sound, the Washington-bin Laden conflict is becoming a battle of spirit versus matter, righteousness and might.

Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of Focus on the Global South of the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute in Bangkok.