Now, kill his dream

　　扼杀了他的梦想

　　Osama bin Laden’s brand of brutal jihad is losing its appeal in the Arab world

　　本拉登的野蛮圣战呼声在阿拉伯国家减弱

　　A FEW bullets were enough. But the shots that killed Osama bin Laden in the dead of night on May 2nd in a fortified compound not far from Islamabad came after 15 years of dogged pursuit, two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, well over $1 trillion of spending and around 150,000 deaths. It is a heavy reckoning for one man’s life.

　　几发子弹绰绰有余。5月2日晚，本拉登在伊斯兰郊区的寓所内被射杀身亡。经过15年不屈不挠地追踪，经历过伊朗和阿富汗两场持久战，花了超过万亿美元的费用，有大约15万人口的死亡。这些付出对于一个区区人命来说，实在是太沉重了。

　　Barack Obama, America’s president, will justifiably savor a moment so dearly bought. A reluctant warrior in other ways, he has not wavered in hunting down the foot soldiers and commanders of al-Qaeda as well as its elusive leader. The president chose a manned assault directly on Mr bin Laden rather than an air strike on his compound, as some of his advisers wished, and it paid off. Mr Obama was lucky, but he made his luck—and he deserves the credit that will now come his way (see Lexington).

　　美国总统奥巴马尽情地享受这个如此昂贵的时刻也在情理之中。从其它方面看，奥巴马并非是个勇士，他并不穷追猛打基地组织的步兵和指挥官，以及他们行事神秘的领导人。奥巴马选择直接袭击本拉登，他没有通过参与空袭增加他的砝码——就像他的谋士给他的建议一样，他的做法获得了收益。奥巴马是幸运的，但是，他的运气给他带来了预期的声望。

　　Mr Obama has been careful to warn that violent Islamism is still a dangerous force. Al-Qaeda is active, even without Mr bin Laden (see article). The alarming problems of Pakistan, Yemen and so many other places threaten to feed more violence. And yet the death of the world’s most wanted man comes just when radical Islam looks vulnerable to the changes sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa. The task now facing all those who yearn for a safer world is to isolate Mr bin Laden’s savage jihad just as surely as its creator was isolated behind his compound walls.

　　奥巴马小心翼翼地告诫，暴力的伊斯兰仍旧很危险。即使没有本拉登，基地组织还是很活跃的。巴基斯坦、也门和很多其它的地区很让人担忧，这些地方是个威胁，他们孕育着更多的恐怖力量。然而， 正值激进的伊斯兰面对横扫整个中东和北非的动乱而表现出比较脆弱的当口，世界上的头号通缉犯本拉登死期到了。现在，那些渴望和平的人们当前要做的是跟本拉登的粗暴的圣战运动撇清关系，就像它的创建者本拉登藏在层层高墙里面一样。

　　The man who warped a faith

　　扭曲了的信仰

　　Mr bin Laden matters because he swept up a ragbag of local grievances into a brand of intoxicating and violent jihad with worldwide pretensions. His vision, however impractical, of purging Islam and establishing a single Islamic caliphate appealed to Muslims disgusted by the venality of their own elites. His means of bringing it about embraced an orgy of murder and martyrdom partly directed against the “Crusader” West, particularly America. Sad to say, that also appealed to many Muslims for a while. And the whole package was decked with the riches-to-rags story of Mr bin Laden himself—a man who had given up power and wealth in Saudi Arabia, lived simply and seemed almost charmed in his capacity to defy the mightiest army in history (see Obituary).

　　本拉登是重要的。他把人们的不满都打包成袋，贴着令人兴奋的圣战的标签，曾获得人们的广泛支持。然而，他的远见是不切实际的。他肃清伊斯兰，建立单一的伊斯兰王权，这些让那些贪污成性的领导高层们反感。他对西方的改革作对——尤其是美国，其中给人们带来了狂乱的杀戮和牺牲者。很遗憾地说，这在短时间内吸引了很多穆斯林。这个袋子裹着本拉登的传奇，他由富变穷，他朴素地的生活，似乎他的魅力仅仅在于能够跟世界上最强大的军事力量作对，而现在他留下了在沙特阿拉伯的权利和财富，撒手归西。

　　Terrorists dream of setting the agenda, and in two ways Mr bin Laden succeeded beyond imagination. For many people, especially non-Muslims, the central place he reserved for violence tainted the whole of Islam. Even as Westerners came to fear bloodthirsty and barbaric Muslims, Muslims deplored degenerate and imperialist Christians. Mr bin Laden’s brand of hatred thrived on both those grotesque stereotypes.

　　从两个方面看来，本拉登超乎想象地达成了基地组织的目标。对于很多人，尤其是非穆斯林人，本拉登为恐怖活动而保留的中心地区使整个伊斯兰都受到了影响。即使西方人忧虑野蛮嗜杀的穆斯林人，穆斯林谴责堕落的帝国主义基督徒。本拉登的憎恨以奇怪的方式膨胀。

　　And by framing the fight as a clash of civilizations, he could draw the West into a global war on terror. The attacks of September 11th 2001 tipped America and the West into a fight that exacted a terrible price in blood and treasure. At home, America has diverted vast resources into a security bureaucracy. Abroad, it has been distracted from the historic challenge that American power faces in Asia.

　　号称是文明的冲突的原因，本拉登把西方国家拉入世界恐怖活动之中。2001年“911”的袭击将美国和西方拉进斗争，使美国人付出血和财富的恐怖的代价。在国内，美国在安全局投入大量财力。在国外，分散了美国挑战亚洲地区的力量。

　　Along the way, America has compromised the values that are its greatest strength. This was partly by accident, because war is always cruel and messy, but also by design, through the torture of jihadist detainees and the oblivion of Guantánamo. It is not yet clear whether finding Mr bin Laden depended on torture (it probably never will be clear, given that the interrogator’s lead identifying Mr bin Laden’s courier took years to bear fruit). What is certain is that his message prospered because he could dismiss America’s commitment to freedom and human rights and claim that the country abused Muslims.

　　一直以来，美国把价值观作为自己最大的优势。这也许是偶然，因为战争总是残忍和肮脏的。但这也是有意的，美国拷打圣战囚徒，漠视关塔那摩监狱。现在尚未明晰的是找到本拉登是否是拷问的结果（这也许永远不会明晰，考虑到审讯本拉登的人员需要多年的时间才问出结果）。可以肯定的是，本拉登的情报很成功，他散布的情报声称，美国虐待穆斯林，这使得美国的表现与他们对自由和人权承诺自相矛盾。

　　That message is potent enough to survive Mr bin Laden’s death. Stuck in his compound, without a telephone or the internet, he had anyway become a remote figure. The al-Qaeda franchise, spread across the Sahel, in the Arabian Peninsula and in cells around the world, will surely now seek to prove its potency. The hope is that the computers, discs and drives American special forces seized during their raid will wreck such plans. Terrorism being what it is, though, an attack sooner or later has every

　　chance of succeeding.

　　这个情报足以让本拉登活命。他藏自己的院子里，没有电话，也上不了网。总之，他成了一个疏远主流的人物。基地组织的力量遍布撒赫尔和阿拉伯半岛，还有世界上的某些小房间里。现在，这些力量力求表现他们的能力。现在只希望电脑、磁盘和驱动这些特殊的力量能在他们的袭击中能破坏这些计划。恐怖主义的袭击，迟早都会得手。

　　Strategic failure

　　战略性失败

　　Even if it does, that should not obscure the fact that Mr bin Laden’s infamy in the West is losing its power to inspire his own people. This partly reflects the failure of violence to accomplish the goals he set himself in the Muslim world. Despite years of bloody strife, the Western way of life has continued to encroach on Muslims. Jihad has failed to banish non-Muslim troops from Islamic countries. Western forces remain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kashmir is home to the Indian army, and Chechnya to the Russians. Israel still flourishes. Not one treacherous Arab government has yielded to the caliphate.

　　即使袭击成功，也不能遮掩本拉登在西方恶行，这对鼓舞他的民众逐渐无力。这一定程度上反映了他在穆斯林的目标的流产。即使经历多年的流血斗争，西方的生活方式还是继续侵入穆斯林世界。圣战组织不能把非穆斯林军队驱逐出伊斯兰国家。西方力量还在伊朗和阿富汗。印度的军队还驻扎在克什米尔，俄罗斯也还占领车臣。以色列还在发展。没有任何一个危险阿拉伯政府屈从于伊斯兰王权。

　　More than that, Mr bin Laden’s desire to murder his way to salvation has at last aroused widespread disgust among Muslims. After al-Qaeda slaughtered Shia and Sunni Muslims in their thousands in Iraq, even fellow jihadis began to condemn his doctrine of takfir, under which radicals took it upon themselves to declare other Muslim apostates and kill them. According to a poll by the Pew Research Centre, confidence in Mr bin Laden in the Palestinian territories has fallen from 72% in 2003 to 34% now. In Jordan it is down from 56% to 13%.

　　而且，至少本拉登企图救助穆斯林的方式在该地区激起普遍的反感。基地组织杀戮了伊朗的什叶派和逊尼派数千人之后，圣战追随者开始谴责他异教的说法。在他的异教说引导下，激进者惟命是从，把其它穆斯林当成叛徒并将其杀害。皮尔研究中心的民意调查显示，巴勒斯坦地区人们对本拉登的信心指数从2003年的72%降到现在的34%，约旦地区这一指数从56%降到了13%。

　　That still leaves a huge reservoir for recruits, but they have been hard to spot in the uprisings sweeping the Arab world. So far the Arab spring has cast violent jihad to the margins. When young Egyptians crowded into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, they wanted rights, not a caliph. Even the Muslim Brothers look as if they will opt for civil society rather than theocracy.

　　这仍有燎原的空间，但是在阿拉伯世界的起义中很难做到。目前阿拉伯起义把暴力的圣战者逼到了悬崖边上。新生的埃及人涌向开罗的解放广场，他们需要的是权利，而不是一个哈里发这样的统治者。甚至是穆斯林兄弟看起来好像更适合文明的社会，而非神权统治。

　　Political change in the Arab world will be neither smooth nor immediate. In some places it is sure to go wrong; in others it may yield to hard-line Islam. And yet, thanks to the Arab spring, Islam stands its best chance in generations of re-engaging with politics to found institutions in which religious and civil life can coexist. That would be a devastating refutation of Mr bin Laden’s ideology of universal Muslim struggle.

　　阿拉伯世界的政变坎坷缓慢。在一些地方人们的确是走错了路。另一些地方则可能屈从于强硬的伊斯兰。然而，多亏了阿拉伯起义，伊斯兰有绝好的机会让新一代的人们建立政治机构，让文明与宗教并存。这对本拉登追求统一的穆斯林这个理想本身又是一个彻底的反击。

　　How to encourage it? First, don’t relent on counter-terrorism. Al-Qaeda will need stopping for years to come. Second, recognize that jihadists will be defeated mainly by Muslims themselves. That means stabilizing the crescent of Muslim countries, mostly outside the Arab world, where broken government has allowed terrorism to gain a hold. All are hard cases. Some, like Somalia and Mali, are only susceptible to containment at best. Afghanistan is close enough to the drawdown of NATO troops in 2014 not to pull out in haste. Most worrying of all is Pakistan (see Banyan). In spite of what looks like duplicity over Mr bin Laden’s hiding place, the nuclear power is too dangerous to abandon. Better for America to hold Pakistan close than cut it loose.

　　那么怎样鼓励伊斯兰的新生？首先，继续反恐斗争。因为基地组织不得不休养生息数年。第二，认识到圣战组织将主要被穆斯林自身击败。那意味着要稳定新的穆斯林国家，他们大多是阿拉伯国家之外的国家，这些国家的破败不堪的政府可能被恐怖组织控制。这两点都是难办的事情。有些国家最容易受牵制，比如索马里和马里。北约军队如果不马上撤离的话，阿富汗2014年就会覆亡。最令人担忧的是巴基斯坦。除了可能会有本拉登的藏身之地外，巴基斯坦的核武器也危险而让人不得不放弃。美国最好是严密监控巴基斯坦不放松。

　　And last there are the Arab countries. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help (see article); but more vital is Western support for the aspirations of the Arab spring. When Mr bin Laden struck on 9/11 the West had few means of defending itself but by attacking him directly and by striking a Faustian bargain with the Arab world’s oppressive rulers. His death comes when Arab opinion is at last flowing in a new direction. It is too good a chance to waste.

　　最后，还需要担心阿拉伯国家。以色列和巴基斯坦的和平是有益的。更重要的是西方国家支持阿拉伯国家改革的愿望。本拉登911袭击事件之后，西方国家没有采取措施自卫，而是直接袭击本拉登，魔鬼般地打击这个压迫阿拉伯的领导人。在阿拉伯终于有新的方向的时候，本拉登死了。这个时机千载难逢，不容错失。