Editorial: Fifteenth of May 2011

Fences and foxes

If you intend to save your chickens from foxes you will build good strong fences and if you tended your chickens well by also ensuring where they have free range to roam was not weedy, bushy or overgrown, it is unlikely when you go picking the eggs you’ll end up with a snake bite.

One is at pains to say that if Pakistan were cast as a farmer, her chickens would have been safe or she would not have come to harm during the morning egg-run.

This is an apt analogical characterisation of the supposed sovereignty of Pakistan and their embarrassment at having the United States of America breach their borders in pursuit of Osama bin Laden that make their protestations and dishonesty hypocrisy at best and an exercise of bare-faced denial of realities and truths they are still failing to address. Things are just not all that right with others than the government besides the US having writ large around Pakistan.

Might of the fox

There is no doubt that in an ideal world the United States should not have entered Pakistani territory to take out Osama bin Laden but it is not the duty of the fox to mend fences or the nature of the snake to resist opportunistic assess to eggs – that is just the way of the world and nature, might almost always determines right rather than the cosy liberal notion of knowing the boundaries of right and wrong.

Then again we profess the upholding of human rights as the basis of our values and as much as can be done is done to project that across the world.

In an ideal setting Osama bin Laden would have best been captured and made to follow the due process of law and justice – he however never presented the means by which anyone could objectively suggest that when cornered he could be captured without his assailants meeting a gruesome end.

In the heat of the raid

He might not have been armed but he might have been wearing a suicide vest as his type of ideology has persuaded others to just as we were informed that he had 500 Euros sewn into his clothes.

The house might well have been booby-trapped needing a trigger which could proximity-based or otherwise, but there is some confidence that allowed him to maintain such a conspicuous house with just the basic security of high walls and strong gates.

In the end, the easiest way to ensure no one else came to serious harm was to shoot him in the head before he thought up something as diabolical as other daring terrorist acts that are attributed to him and his acolytes.

The despatch

For the havoc this particular person had wreaked on the world, the innocent, his fellow Muslims, life, property, economies, security and much more; Osama bin Laden had in terms excluded himself from any reasonable quest that should have sought to protect of his rights and was hardly deserving of the dignities, respect or honour that people would like to arrogate to him.

Osama bin Laden was a singularly special case and should never be conflated with other issues of policy, politics, values, justice or sovereignty; he had to be summarily dealt with on apprehension and promptly disposed of on expiry.

Much as one could be given the opportunity to dance on his grave, it is one offer that should be declined; I cannot swim.