On 2 May 2011, America’s public enemy number one, Osama bin Laden, was killed by Navy SEALs in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The raid only lasted 40 minutes, but the hunt for bin Laden took two decades.

For 20 years, a small team of female agents known as “The Sisterhood” tracked the activities of al-Qaeda. They were trying to take down bin Laden before most of us even knew his name. Piecing together scraps of intelligence, they uncovered a secret terrorist organisation, al-Qaeda, and warned Washington of this new impending threat. Their warnings were repeatedly ignored, until the 9/11 attacks, when all the rules changed.

In Manhunt, director Greg Barker takes the viewer through the process that eventually led to the discovery of the world’s most wanted terrorist, giving a peek into the hidden world of the US intelligence community, which turns out to be populated by ordinary people wondering whether waging war is really part of their job description.

Directed by Greg Barker
Duration: 103′
Year: 2013

For such an appeal by bin Laden, see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 1286, “Bin Laden’s Speeches 2003-2006,” September 8, 2006. See also an article titled “No Peace without Islam” published by the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC, now called Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) in the October 2005 issue of its journal Al-Jama’a. The author of the article, Abu Mus’ab ‘Abd Al-Wadoud (now the group’s leader) calls on the Algerians to refrain from signing agreements with the government, and to invest their efforts in reestablishing the historic Islamic caliphate. Al-Jama’a, October 2005, p. 24 link

Of course, it’s a variant of various refrains that you can trace through the twisted path of ‘political Islam’. In as far as it relates to Afghanistan – who are running up to Peace One Day – I’d say that Islam is here to stay. It remains applicable to the issue of negotiations, though. A significant proportion of the Taliban’s fighting force is religously-motivated – again, just like in the 1980s against the Soviets – and given conviction from fatwas pronounced by local Mullahs…this means that there is no way to ‘convince’ or negotiate your way out of the conflict.