Can't find that figurehead

OPINION: Many's the bookmaker who would have cause to fall to his knees and thank God, or more likely Mammon, that they never took bets on Osama bin Laden's longevity after the September 11 attacks, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

Because who would have got that one right?

In the climate of vengeful righteousness that followed the 2001 strikes on New York, bin Laden was seen not merely as some Arabian Nights villain, but a man marked as marked could possibly be. Not since World War II has there been a figure whom so much of the western world has agreed must be found, stopped and punished.

And, of course, there was modern technology to empower the brisk and purposeful business of hauling his ass to justice, which we all knew would most likely entail placing him directly before that deity of his.

He could cower in those Afghanistan caves all he liked, we told ourselves, but the satellites, the cameras, the good old-fashioned bounty approach, they would get him and much, much sooner than later.

Yet it has not happened. It turns out the west isn't that good at enacting its own fatwas.

bin Laden must be the biggest running sore the United States has had. Failure to capture or kill him strengthened the impression that President George W Bush was incompetent. Presidential candidate John McCain pledged to pursue him to the gates of hell, only to be sorrowfully assured that the Afghanistan terrain, so wild and difficult that it hasn't ever been properly mapped, is already a pretty good approximation of that locale.

And still the man survives, malevolently plotting. The line from the US now is more that he is striving against irrelevance, though this is partly true at best. In his latest audio message he insists he endorsed the attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day. The preferred interpretation from the west is that while this may have been in accord with his agenda, there was no sign that he or senior al Qaeda figures had anything to do with the attempt. A figurehead, then, rather than an actual leader of the global jihad movement.

Fact is, figureheads matter. Those who are to a greater or lesser degree likeminded with bin Laden about the need for the nation of Muhammad to strike against its enemies can only see his survival as a significant success. There is a case to be put that if his actual ability to manage terror strikes directly is sufficiently diminished, it is a better strategic outcome to render bin Laden a yappy, self-promoting irrelevance rather than invest him with the stature of a martyr. In truth, however, the Western World still wants him hauled to account somehow.

It is right to pursue him even now, for all the frustrations that this entails. But it's proving a maddening task. That none within his own organisation have been able to be enticed, as far as we can tell, to turn on him is testament to the reality, whether we like it or night, that he maintains a supremely tight-knit support base. What's more – perhaps this doesn't quite go without saying – they don't see themselves as the villains. For all the horrors of their own tactics, and their debasement of the Islamic faith (they are to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity, as the fictitious presidency of The West Wing explained it for TV viewers), their zealotry is based on what they regard as the highest of ideals.

They are impelled in their folly by seething anger at the worst tactics of their opponents. Even as we pursue them, we must be careful not to become their mirror image.

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