The war on terror – Endgame

Osama bin Laden was one of the figures who shaped what the 21st century has become. He was key to a type of violence that had never been encountered before.

One dimension was the scale of killing. He and those he inspired sought to achieve the maximum number of deaths. In the 1970s the academic consensus was that terrorists wanted "a lot of people watching". In bin Laden's case the aim was "a lot of people dead". Bin Laden's violence was also deterritorialised. It was a new form of global violence, not aimed at bringing about change in any particular society. His fatwa of 1996 called on Muslims to kill Americans and their allies, wherever they might be.

This lack of interest in national contexts meant that al-Qaeda, the armed group he founded, expressed no interest in developing a political program and, unlike terrorist organisations formed in the 20th century, it did not create a political "front" or political party. There was no plan beyond a new type of global violence that for a time seemed to be able to federate disparate groups of fighters in countries as diverse as Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan and Yemen.

Significantly, almost no Palestinians were involved in al-Qaeda. They were involved in a struggle of national liberation, and talk of a global jihad against Americans and their allies did not speak to their struggle for a nation state.

For a time bin Laden was able to bring together a disparate clutch of violent actors in a diverse range of countries. Before 11 September, 2001, this was a well-funded organisation based in Afghanistan. But by 2005 the organisational and financial structure of al-Qaeda had been destroyed, its violence mutating into a search for the extreme that we encounter in the killings led by Zarqawi of Shia Muslims in Iraq.

The rise and fall of al-Qaeda leaves us with a series of questions. The violence that we still encounter, such as the attempted attack on New York's Times Square last year, was a "bottom up" attack, the product of an individual living in the United States who decided to go to Pakistan and seek the support of the Pakistan Taliban for a mass killing of Americans.

If the groups claiming allegiance to Osama bin Laden have been fragmenting over the past five years, his death is likely to accelerate this process. The people who study these networks underline the tensions and conflicts between the groups involved, in particular between Egyptians and Saudis.

But the big picture today is the striking absence of jihadist groups from the movement for democracy that has been sweeping the Arab world since November. These social transformations are being driven by young people, trade unionists, women's groups and Facebookers. Bin Laden's jihad is experienced as anachronistic, a throwback to another time. The exception here is Pakistan, but this has less to do with bin Laden than with Pakistan and Afghan politics.

The key movements shaping the Arab world are movements for democracy. These, rather than security services, will bring about the end of jihadism. And there are signs that the jihadist rump is aware of this. The 28 April attack on one of the most famous tourist cafés in Marrakech, Morocco, where some 15 people were killed in an explosion, clearly aims at disrupting the process of democratisation going on in that country.

The history of terrorist groups teaches us that as they decline their violence becomes more intense. They come to see the world as made up of the guilty and the impure, while violence increasingly comes to replace any political project or demands. Increasingly murderous violence can be a sign of the death throes of such groups.

One key indicator of this process is that the group's violence turns inwards, to purify itself and rid itself of traitors. This happened in the final days of the different terrorist groups that emerged out of the student movements of the 1960s, most dramatically in the case of the Unified Red Army in Japan, which in its final days killed more than a third of its own members in the attempt to rid itself of traitors. There are signs that this dynamic is evident today among groups claiming allegiance to bin Laden.

The collapse of al-Qaeda is one story. But we need to consider what bringing this about has meant.

The "war on terror" can be seen as extending a transformation of war that became increasingly evident over the 20th century. During the First World War, conflict took place between organised professional armies, often in isolated fields. In that war, 90 per cent of those killed were military personnel and 10 per cent were non-combatants. By the Second World War, that had changed – more than 50 per cent of those killed were civilians. By the 1990s war had come full circle – in the wars of that decade it is estimated only 10 per cent of those killed were military personnel.

Over the 20th century war went from isolated fields to cities and suburbs, and from the confrontation between professional armies to new constellations of violence involving families, networks, organised crime, friends and even individuals. Fewer than one in 10 wars since 2000 involve armed confrontation between two or more states, which we still tend to think of as the model of war.

New patterns have become increasingly evident in the "war on terror". One is the blurring between military, combatant and criminal, and the creation of new categories such as "enemy combatant". Another is the extraordinary entry of private corporations into war, and more generally "private experience" that we saw in horrific form in Abu Ghraib, where military reservists played out sadomasochistic fantasies with prisoners, taking and circulating photographs modelled on the pornographic magazines they were consuming.

The killing of bin Laden alerts us to further shift, the development of targeted assassination as an instrument of war. This has accelerated and generalised over the past years, a development highlighted last year by the United Nations in a Special Report investigating extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions as a method of war. The report describes this practice generalising from armed conflicts to law enforcement, private security officials, and counter-terrorism. This same paradigm of war shapes the use of drones and Hellfire missiles in Pakistan by the United States.

This is also the implicit justification of the use of torture, with waterboarding, widely practised by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge being embraced as a technique of "enhanced interrogation".

There are no easy answers to the questions raised by these developments. The networks that bin Laden brought together in the 1990s were committed to mass killing as both means and end. Terrorist groups reject any separation of zone of war and zone of peace, so commuters on trains become targets.

Over the past decade we have witnessed a new type of war as a response to this, one where war becomes a based on a paradigm of "manhunting". The aim here is to identify, target and kill individual opponents, a response to the highly personalised nature of the networks confronting states.

Philip Alston, the Australian legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, notes that today states are seeking legal recognition of the right to assassinate enemies. This amounts to a death penalty without any legal process.

Whether accidental or deliberate, the killing of an apparently unarmed Osama bin Laden is part of this wider model of war. So too are the crowds spilling onto the streets, with their disturbing echoes of last century's celebrations of lynchings.

Security specialists chorus that bin Laden's death changes nothing and the war must continue relentlessly.

They are certainly right to insist that the threat of terrorism remains real, and will remain so for some time. But the global jihad is over. Bin Laden was an anachronism even before he was killed. The problems of Pakistan, Afghanistan or Yemen will not be solved by targeted assassinations and a mindset that frames every problem in terms of a global war to be solved in terms of military expenditure and security.

And in the West, we need to remember that wars are a potent engine of social and cultural transformation. In Australia we are aware of this in acts of remembrance on ANZAC Day. But if we come to accept assassination and torture as instruments of conflict, it is not so sure that future generations will thank us for the legacy of the war on terror.