Did Osama bin Laden Win the War After All?

An aerial view of New York's Ground Zero

It's a pity some US Navy seal blew Osama bin Laden's brains out in that compound in Pakistan. In one sense, anyway. Because now we'll never really know what was going through his mind when he decided to make war on modernity. We'll never know, either, whether he was content with the progress, if that's the right word, of his plan to drag us all back into the pre-medieval dark age. Presumably that was his plan. If he had one.

Also, realistically, even if the Americans had simply laid hands on him to spirit him away into years of detention and hostile debriefing before finally slipping a needle into his arm, we probably still wouldn't have known what he was thinking. Very few of the thoughts of the most senior Al Qaeda leaders who have been captured have ever made it into the public domain. And if they did, it's unlikely many people would trust in their veracity, coming as they did from men questioned under torture.

In the end these are the things we have to ask and answer for ourselves. After the September 11 atrocities, what did we do wrong? What did we get right?

We've been asking these questions in one form or another all over the world since the planes flew into the twin towers and the Pentagon back in 2001. We ask them every time another soldier dies in Afghanistan. We ask them when the French government outlaws religious headdress. Or when other governments ban the construction of mosques. When I say ‘‘we’’ I don't mean it in a small minded, parochial sense. I mean we of the modern world. The world that thought it had moved beyond religious bloodletting.

We don't talk about the War on Terror anymore, and that's probably a good thing. It was always a dumb name. But we still fight it of course, or rather a small number of our military personnel do – and here I mean small in a relative sense. The US, for instance, has tens of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan, but as a society it has not mobilised to fight that war.

As a society it arguably has bigger problems nowadays. In that sense maybe bin Laden failed. He wanted his holy war to be the most important thing in the world. The only thing in the world. It's been a long time since that was the case.

But one question worth asking is whether he won in another way. Would the economy of the West be in such a wretched state had we not collectively poured trillions of dollars into the destructive arts of war this past decade? It is an impossible question to answer. Even if you differentiate between a war of choice in Iraq and a war of need in Afghanistan you cannot disentangle one from the other. That's not how history works.