The war on terror – Endgame

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.