Alive or dead, Bin Laden is now history

Writing in the American journal Foreign Affairs a quarter of a century ago, the Middle East historian David Fromkin described the terrorist as being "like a magician who tricks you into watching his right hand while his left hand, unnoticed, makes the switch."

It is a comment worth recalling as Osama bin Laden reappears on the world's television screens. Even if, as seems quite possible, he is speaking from the grave, he is still achieving his objective. He may or may not have eluded his pursuers physically, but he has once more surprised and discomfited them. In any case, his own physical survival as an end in itself is unlikely to be, or to have been, important to Bin Laden. It is the manner of his death and the dance he can lead his enemies on the way to it which is important.

Terrorism, Fromkin wrote, achieves its goal "not through its acts but through the response to its acts". It is not his move that matters, but your countermove. Well though this principle is now understood in theory, it is undoubtedly difficult to apply in practice. The strength of the enemy, as Israeli Irgun veterans explained it to Fromkin, is turned against him. "Britain," they decided, "was big enough to defeat itself." So they provoked a huge military and political effort in Palestine which they knew Britain was strong enough to mount but not strong enough to sustain.

In a very different context but one not without some parallels, America, with some little help from its friends, is now making such an effort. The US is a power with far more resources than a weakened Britain possessed in the aftermath of the second world war. Still, it remains true that the question needing to be asked after each twist and turn in this story is the same. Is this what "they" wanted us to do? If the answer is yes, it may be that "they" are winning.

The trouble is that what they want you to do is often what you unavoidably have to do, for reasons of public opinion, for reasons of pride and because states do what they can do rather than what they ideally ought to do. The terrorist does not need to be elevated to the level of genius or even to that of Fromkin's magician for this to be true. He can blunder and miscalculate, and his organisation often turns out to be, when the facts are picked over later, much less clever and all encompassing than appeared at the time. Yet you do not have to be a genius to burn down the farmer's haystack, in the shape of the store of wealth and order which the world has been able to build up.

It is not the vulnerability of individuals to particular acts of terror which matters most but the vulnerability, as it were, of everything. In the same anthology of essays from Foreign Affairs is a piece by Arnold Toynbee written in January 1939. He writes: "The prospect of having one's wife and children as well as oneself massacred under one's own roof was one which the European householder had not had to look in the face since the last of the raids of the Vikings and the Magyars." So much for the physical destruction.

Worse was that "the things we mean by England, France, Europe, would be destroyed beyond possibility of restoration... not only the landscape and the buildings, and the inhabitants... but the invisible things of the spirit which are the essence of a community and a civilisation." The damage that terrorists can do today is less than the aerial bombing of the second world war and far, far less than what nuclear war with the Soviet Union would have inflicted. Still, one can easily imagine blows that would have a crippling effect, and that is one of Bin Laden's successes.

He has brought an ominous lack of predictability, not new in human affairs, but one to which the present generation in the west was unused. Toynbee's generation knew it well - he spoke of running "once again, into a fog in which we cannot yet see beyond our noses". The fear which Bin Laden has conjured is not now a fear of what he can do - he is already history, whether or not he is still alive - but of his legacy in Gaza and Quetta, Brixton and Marseille. If a foolish young man who probably had no connection with al-Qaida and not much with lesser organisations can walk on a plane with bombs in his shoes then Bin Laden has already achieved one of his aims. He is being emulated, and it is his emulators we should worry about, not him.

The American Encounter, edited by James F Hoge and Fareed Zakaria (HarperCollins).

m.woollacott@guardian.co.uk