Obama vs. Osama

The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden by Mark Bowden; Atlantic Monthly Press; Price: Rs.299; 288 pp

In October 2002, a then little-known Illinois senator denounced the White House’s plan to invade Iraq, saying: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars… You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with bin Laden and al-Qaeda…” The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden retraces recently reelected President Barack Obama’s efforts to make good that 2002 speech.

Theoretically, journalist Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) is ideally qualified to write this book. Throughout a prolific career, he has skillfully tied together documentary evidence and participant interviews to create engaging narratives of combat events. Unfortunately, The Finish lacks the vivid detail and immediacy of the author’s best work. As a result it’s merely important, neither essential nor compelling reading. Rather than the definitive account of the Abbottabad raid, The Finish reads like a well-written Obama administration official report.

Blame restricted access. Unable to interview the Navy SEAL (sea, air and land) teams involved, and not privy to key bits of classified information, Bowden devotes less than 10 percent of The Finish to the raid itself. Forced to widen his scope, the focus of this historical narrative is a battle of personalities — the triumph of a nuanced pragmatist over a rigid fantasist. Thus, after introducing a host of peripheral characters, the book quickly settles into its driving narrative: Obama vs. Osama.

In the early pages, we learn that the 9/11 attacks pushed Obama to break from the traditional left-of-centre style of conflict resolution. But he remained wary of emotional battle cries and started believing in foreign policy grounded in reality, rather than ideology. “The way he (Obama) saw it,” writes Bowden, “America was not at war with something amorphous, like a concept or a tactic. It was at war with specific individuals who had attacked the country and continued to threaten it.”

Therefore immediately after assuming office, the new president sought to disentangle America from its two messy occupations while simultaneously planning the destruction of al-Qaeda’s leadership. He soon learned, however, that the Bush administration had not entirely neglected bin Laden. With two major wars demanding resources, the White House and Pentagon lacked the bandwidth to make bin Laden a top priority.

How Obama and his team refocused the national security apparatus, and how it bore fruit on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, provides material for the subsequent chapters. Throughout, the president is described as a measured and intelligent leader, who surprises close aides and grizzled combat veterans with his willingness to target and pull the trigger.

Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Bowden fleshes out his thesis: If Obama had actively worked to develop and mature his world view, bin Laden had confined himself to a narrow literal interpretation of Islam at a young age and never questioned it. Delusional and frustrated, but ever certain of final glory, the al-Qaeda chieftain brooded in his fortress/prison for years, firing off impotent exhortations to increasingly disillusioned cadres. This lengthy counterpoint narrative is not written as convincingly, but it does effectively underscore bin Laden’s importance to al-Qaeda. He hid in Abbottabad not because he feared death — he’d proved in the past a perfect willingness to die — but because his death would mean the death of his organisation.

The Finish mixes these twin narratives into its other great theme: Warfare has changed irrevocably. “Information and intelligence” are the “fire and maneuver” of the 21st century, and America will increasingly rely on “reconstituted spy networks, super computers, state-of-the-art software, global surveillance, and elite commando units,” rather than large occupying armies and resource-draining expensive weaponry.

These themes enable the author to bestow some praise to those outside the president’s penumbra. After 9/11, throughout painful losses in Afghanistan and Iraq, the defence establishment overhauled its intelligence-gathering and analysis modus operandi. It was only a matter of time, the author suggests, until this new methodology pinpointed bin Laden. But this process raises a few additional, uncomfortable issues. Firstly, “enhanced interrogation”, some of it done to Guantanamo Bay detainees, helped identify bin Laden’s personal courier. Moreover, the controversial Predator Drone strikes and targeted killings which have decimated al-Qaeda will continue and in all likelihood intensify despite considerable collateral damage. Should the Nobel committee read The Finish, it might regret awarding President Obama the Peace Prize of 2009.

Those searching for mention of India will be disappointed. While Bowden focuses on the deterioration of US-Pakistan bonhomie, he fails to discuss this phenomenon within a geopolitical framework. Though he cites very few outright condemnations of Islamabad, it’s clear President Obama had no delusions about his supposed ally. When deciding to keep Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence uninformed about the Abbottabad raid, the prevailing attitude in the White House was that if the mission destroyed the relationship, “it was probably doomed anyway”.

Bowden’s brief description of the raid itself, though written with grace and clarity, adds little to extant literature available online. For a more detailed description of the Abbottabad mission, read No Easy Day, written anonymously by one of the SEALs who killed bin Laden.

The value addition of The Finish is that it traces Obama’s transformation from a student squeamish about violence into a hard-nosed commander-in-chief. This tacit endorsement of Obama’s leadership qualities, bestowed by a writer with Bowden’s foreign policy knowhow, could have translated into votes for the incumbent. But President Obama hardly parlayed the bin Laden success into concrete gains on the campaign trail. Almost as if affirming his characterisation in The Finish, the president appeared uneasy whenever playing the cheerleader for death.

Ultimately, the electorate chose to confer a second term upon President Obama. Given the ongoing turbulence in the Middle East, even if The Finish merely echoes the White House’s version of the Abbottabad raid, it reverberates powerfully all the same. According to its acclaimed author, America has entrusted its security to a man intellectually inclined towards pacifism but capable of wielding the deadly power of American military technology to maximum effect.

Matthew Schneeberger

Frothy satire

Duty Free by Moni Mohsin; Vintage Books; Price: Rs.590; 311 pp

“Lahore has just three problems: traffic, terrorists, and smog. Otherwise tau it’s just fab,’’ states the anonymous heroine of Moni Mohsin’s debut American novel Duty Free. With this line early in the book, Mohsin sets the tone for her trade mark satire of Pakistan’s nouveau riche.

A household name within the bourgeoisie of neighbouring Pakistan, Mohsin is an anthropology graduate of Cambridge University who started Pakistan’s first environmental magazine and later worked for its first independent weekly paper The Friday Times. Her first novel The End of Innocence (2006), fetched her Pakistan’s National Literary Award and second book, The Diary of a Social Butterfly (2008), earned her sub-continental fame.

Duty Free, like Social Butterfly preceding it, is a fictional satire on Pakistan’s upper crust. A member of Lahore’s high society, the leading lady of the book receives a charge from her aunt: find my son a new wife, the aunt says on a fine day in September, and make sure he gets married by year’s end. Through emotional blackmail, the heroine’s aunt leaves our main girl no choice. What follows is a sardonic evocation of the upper echelons of society in contemporary Pakistan, as they float through life with absurd airs and fantasies. When charged with finding an upper class cousin with a suitable wife, a girl can’t do without designer wear, can she?

“I’m wearing my new cream Prada shoes I got from Dubai, so everyone can see and my new cream outfit I’ve made to match,’’ she says, describing her preparations for a social outing. “...now I’m looking just like Angelina Jolie. But like her healthier, just slightly older sister. I know I shouldn’t do my own praises but facts are facts, no?’’

Mohsin’s narrative intertwines several elements which will sound familiar to South Asian readers: the obligation towards family, even if the said family manipulates you; using major social events to hunt for potential brides; the generational struggle between an old guard that still values class and background and the younger generation  sidestepping all that for love.

Non-South Asian readers are unlikely to comprehend all of the heroine’s expressions and exclamations in colloquial Urdu. Mohsin has definitely chosen to camp on this side of the cultural divide with this decision. A Western audience therefore, may lose the full effect of the heroine’s musings and exchanges with other characters. Nevertheless most readers will appreciate her naivete and have a pleasurable experience exploring Lahore through her eyes.

There’s a gritty realism in the heroine’s observations of the lifestyles of the rich and famous in Pakistan’s hierarchical society.  Despite the social and political turmoil churning across this troubled theocracy, the decadent elite continue to live life on their own terms. This is evidenced in developments such as the April 2012 launch of Hello! Pakistan, an extension of the international Hello! magazine. Hello! Pakistan profiles the gilded upper crust, which some citizens of that country believe stimulates Pakistan’s glitterati to continue to indulge in their self-induced ennui and ignorance about  serious life-and-death problems faced by the other 99 percent. The two worlds are irreconciliably apart.

This is the outcome of the squeezing of Pakistan’s middle class — agnostics or mildly religious citizens  — getting on with everyday work. With fundamentalists disapproving — often violently — of all vestiges of artistic expression, the general populace is forced to either cling more tightly to religion or wholly embrace Western values. And by embracing these values (chief among them the individualism shunned by most Asian cultures), the tiny educated upper middle class has shut its eyes to the swelling tide of fundamentalism which could overwhelm the failing state that is contemporary Pakistan.

Richly detailed and merciless in its exposure of Pakistan’s dissolute elite, Duty Free is over the top exactly where it needs to be and self-absorbed in the right places. However, Mohsin’s narrative drags in the middle, as she devotes whole pages to establish the heroine’s character and points of view.

Mohsin writes in a breezy, laid-back style, making readers feel like they’re meeting friends over a cup of tea. With this type of scene setting, she’s written another entertaining page turner.

Ekta R. Garg