Reflections
Reflections
by Rebecca Zimmerman
Osama bin Laden is dead, and it makes me want to cry. Puzzle that one out, if you will. Bin Laden has dogged my professional life since 1998. On September 12, 2001 I was asleep on a bus in rural Nepal when a rap on my window woke me in time to hear, “your World Trade Towers, they are gone!” I scribbled in my journal all the way back to Kathmandu; even without details I wrote that I knew it must be Osama bin Laden. Today, Afghanistan is my life. After two extended field research trips embedded with the military and working with Afghans, I’ve returned home to write my dissertation on the U.S. military’s experience there. By rights, I should have been among those who gathered by the White House in joyful celebration. But as I examine the reasons much of America is celebrating I cannot find justification for such brash, self-congratulatory cheer. And I am not alone, those friends of mine who have shouldered the greatest burdens of the last decade are somber and qualified in their reactions.
To view Osama bin Laden as the gravitational center of global Islamist terrorism is to see the world as it was a decade ago. Terrorism and (mercifully) counterterrorism have evolved profoundly since then. As the pundits have already remarked, any tangible effect is likely to be negative, in the form of hasty reprisals from Islamist affinity groups. If this was the point of all this war, I’d rather have just kept my friends alive and let Osama die a forgotten old man, thank you very much. Of course his death wasn’t ever the sole point. But even by those who understand that Osama bin Laden’s death has little intrinsic value, I am told we should celebrate the symbolic victory of this moment.
As a civilian among the military, I often find myself caught between two visions of this war. The war as many Americans see it is a titanic, ideological clash through which the innocent can be liberated from fanaticism. In this war we have given evil a face, and with its destruction feel thrillingly victorious. But the real war isn’t like that at all. The real war is one where you find out the district subgovernor you’ve been backing for six months is a murderer. It is one where the rich and powerful play us off against our enemies for profit and power. It is confusing, it is hard, and it is increasingly misunderstood and maligned by the American people. In this war evil has no face, and there will never be a golden moment when we can call it vanquished.
Today I am deflated. I fear that this false summit, this pretend victory in an imagined war, will sap America’s resolve for the real, confusing war that continues. I am thinking about the Afghans I know who have endured much and will fear what they will assume is a reinvigorated schedule for U.S. military withdrawal. And I am thinking about my deployed friends, alone and unafraid, trying to do right amid a vast array of bad choices. We haven’t even figured out how to win the real war yet, if we follow our fantasies perhaps we never will.
Last summer, in the darkest night imaginable, I stood at a fallen comrade ceremony in Helmand. The formation broke and five Marines walked briskly to the edge of the tarmac, picked up their rucks and strapped on their helmets. In silence they walked to a waiting helicopter and flew back to the fight. At home many are cheering, but all I can see are the thousands who, as we celebrate, are shouldering their packs and heading out, back into the real war.
Rebecca Zimmerman is a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project. She has extensive field research experience in Afghanistan and the southern Philippines.
