Wilson School hosts panel on bin Laden

The Wilson School held a panel titled “After bin Laden: The Implications for Foreign Relations and Policy” in Robertson Hall on Monday to examine the political ramifications for the United States, the Middle East and the Taliban following the May 2 death of the al-Qaida founder.

The discussion, featuring Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, Wilson School professor Jacob Shapiro, Wilson School Associate Dean Nolan McCarty and Wilson School MPP candidate Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Cady, drew a crowd of nearly 200 people.

Slaughter, the former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, spoke first, addressing the current state of U.S. diplomacy in the Arab world.

“It’s a moment for the U.S. to reassess,” Slaughter said. “This is a moment where, for a number of reasons, there’s a better chance of getting a settlement to end the war in Pakistan than there has been for a long time.”

Slaughter noted the historical and geopolitical frameworks of bin Laden’s death, examining the ways in which periodic U.S. involvement in Pakistan has posed challenges for diplomacy. She also discussed the implausibility of a unified Pakistan and the inevitability of the current unrest in the North Africa and Middle East region.

Shapiro, the co-director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, followed Slaughter by discussing the threat imposed by bin Laden’s death on the legitimacy and power of current Pakistani political officials.

“There are a number of kinds of myths that people like to talk about or tell themselves in Pakistani politics,” Shapiro said. “That narrative now becomes much more difficult to sustain.”

He said that Pakistan’s military, political leaders and intelligence agency have lost a significant amount of credibility since the beginning of May due to the aftermath of bin Laden’s death and the information that has since been released.

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McCarty focused on domestic politics, discussing “why there wasn’t a bigger rally around the president” following the successful execution of the military operation.

He said that many Americans today overwhelmingly prioritized issues regarding the economy over counterterrorism and that American politics today were “very polarized.”

“Just the nature of our polarized politics has meant that even very big events like the events of last Sunday don’t have as big of an effect,” McCarty said. “The public remains polarized on partisan grounds with regard to the president.”

He cited a recent Gallup poll that found that Democrats’ job approval ratings of the president remained steady at 81 percent before and after Osama bin Laden’s death, while Republican support jumped from 9 percent to 21 percent.

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Cady, a Navy SEAL who has spent 13 years in the Navy, spoke firsthand about the difficulty of pursuing counterinsurgency initiatives while simultaneously trying to gain the confidence of locals, who often know critical information. Cady has been deployed four times to Iraq, once to the Far East and once to South America.

Cady noted that the 10 years following the 9/11 attacks have prompted the development of new types of intelligence gathering and military strategy that incorporate technology experts, academics and think tanks as well as military professionals. He added that the change in the U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East is likely to continue on this path.

“Was this an amazing, unique operation? Absolutely,” Cady said. “Is it going to be the last one? It’s unlikely to be the case.”

Students who attended the discussion said they were impressed by the level of analysis provided by the panelists.

“It was an informative panel, in the sense that it attempted to tackle the political fallout of the assassination in a variety of contexts that you might not get through most media coverage,” Wilson School graduate student Andrew Shaver said. “For example, what does this do to terrorism? How does this affect U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East on a variety of levels?”

Nima Alidoust, a graduate student in electrical engineering, said the composition of the panel was also effective.

“It was a very balanced combination of people: two academics, one military professional and one lawyer who is also an academic,” he said. “The panel really addressed all of the main bullet points that are on pundits’ minds.”