Bin Laden Top 10 List: His Death and What's Next

1. His importance to the story of Al Qa'eda can’t be underestimated. Last summer at a private gathering, I heard a journalist who met bin Laden in the 1990s say that he had underestimated bin Laden’s central role, not just as the money man and spiritual leader of the organization but also in determining strategy.

2. Osama bin Laden was no longer central to the continuing threat of Al Qa'eda and AQ-inspired terrorism. 

9/11 ensured that. A massive gamble to shift the status quo in the Middle East, it ultimately shifted the focus of Al Qa'eda, as the organisation dispersed, with its leaders’ priority on survival. Those inspired by Al Qa'eda and bin Laden now in many ways represent the biggest threat.

3. Despite media speculation that bin Laden would be heavily guarded by supporters, he appears to have had very few people with him at the end. This could have been a desire not to draw attention to himself --- although the size of his compound suggests the contrary --- or confirmation that Al Qa'eda, as officially constituted,  has dramatically declined in terms of its capabilities.

4. Bin Laden had always said he would not be taken alive, and his bodyguards apparently had orders to kill him in order to prevent his capture. It will be interesting to see whether it was in fact an American bullet that ended his life.  His death also saves the Obama administration from the major headache of how to try a captured terrorist leader.

5. The US government program Rewards for Justice (which I’ve written about in my book Snitch) had been offering a $25 million reward for information leading to the capture or death of bin Laden. It will be interesting to see if any of the reward is paid out.

 From reports it appears that it will not be,  since the initial information that led the US to begin to seek out the courier(s) that eventually led them to bin Laden appears to have come through an interrogation four years ago and not through volunteered information that would lead to a payment. The offering of cash has failed for years to generate any serious tips leading to bin Laden and he himself dismissed these efforts in an interview in the late 1990s.

6. The assumption must now be that Ayman al-Zawahiri will become the head of Al Qa'eda and the main target of continuing American efforts against the leadership. Al Zawahiri has long been overshadowed by bin Laden despite being hailed as the strategic mind behind Al Qa'eda.

7. It is interesting that bin Laden was not targeted using the CIA drones which the Obama administration have extensively used across Pakistan since coming into office. The US is still capable of going in directly when it wants to, whatever the risk. 

This perhaps undermines one of the big arguments in favour of drones: that they must be used because of the dangers of boots on the ground.

8. There will be a short-term boost for Obama politically, especially since he promised during the 2008 Presidential campaign that the US would eventually kill bin Laden. Nevertheless, partisanship will soon return --- because the initial awareness of the courier link to bin Laden occurred during the Bush Administration, some Republicans will claim a share of the credit. 

Long-term? Bin Laden is tangential: the economy will be the decider of the 2012 US election.

9. The death of bin Laden may well lead to renewed and louder calls to pull out of Afghanistan, undermiing already dwindling support for that conflict since the original goal of the invasion now seems to be met. The fact that bin Laden was in Pakistan also points to the central place of that nation in terms of international security, especially in the context of counter-terrorism, and the fact that Afghanistan is really a sideshow.

10. Terrorism will not end with the death of bin Laden. There will undoubtedly be retaliatory attacks in his name. However, one of the legacies of 9-11 is that the security regime it unleashed makes future attacks on that scale  nearly impossible. 

Bin Laden will remain an inspirational figure for his efforts, first against the Soviet Union and then against the US, and those motivated by him now remain the greatest threat. 

But bin Laden failed to offer any positive political agenda for the future, which is why Al Qa'eada is so absent from the current events in the Middle East.