A World without bin Laden

The elimination of the Islamic prophet of terror is a success by Obama that Pakistan must explain.

The elimination of Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani refuge by U.S. commandos, with orders to detain or kill the brain of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a great symbolic victory for the USA — which has searched for its public enemy No. 1 for more than 10 years — and for the entire civilized world. But it should not mean any substantial changes in the fight against al-Qaida and international Islamic terrorism. Many countries are on alert with the expectation that fanatics intent on revenge will take spectacular and immediate action for the death of their Holy Man, who is more frequently referenced as a figure in the bombings for “the cause” than a leader capable of deciding and controlling attacks.

The annihilation of the architect of terrorism whose name throughout the West has become synonymous with the apocalypse, represents a fresh breath of air for Barack Obama, in times of growing domestic and international uncertainty. The president has been careful to stress that the mission was something carefully planned and personally supervised by him, starting last August when they had sufficient assurances, until the definitive green light on Friday. Obama, who solemnized the announcement after informing George W. Bush, has shaken off the Republican’s accusations of being spineless and has won [support] inside and outside [of the Democratic Party]. The joy that brought thousands of Americans out into the night streets, has widened America’s diminished credit and underpins future decisions.

A task such as the extermination of bin Laden, executed in less than an hour, but prepared for years, hides a multitude of grays. But the key element, and the one with the largest implications, is the role played by the Pakistani government. Pakistan, Washington’s nominal ally against terrorism, a key country in the Afghanistan War and recipient of billions in military aid, has been the epicenter of the battle against al-Qaida and the global jihad. Islamabad has continuously negated, against all evidence, links with violent fundamentalism and has tried to ignore the whereabouts of bin Laden or hide it in remote mountains on the border of Afghanistan. That the discovery of this impregnable hideout was in the comfort of a large fortified house, in a vacation area near the capital of Pakistan, home to a military academy, raises obvious questions that lead to obvious answers in a nation controlled by secret services. The operation to kill bin Laden, of which Islamabad was informed of after the fact, could seal an irreversible cooling of the precarious relations between the two countries.

Even if the death of bin Laden takes an enormous psychological toll on al-Qaida, no realistic government will back down an inch in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Al-Qaida, whose core nucleus has been decimated by U.S. missiles on Pakistani soil, is not the hierarchical and centralized group that preceded the Sept. 11 massacre, but rather a franchise that is becoming more and more autonomous and local. The multiplicity of attacks in recent years, in very different places, has revealed that bin Laden’s creature has transformed into a fragmented and diffuse murdering fervor, capable of hitting with relatively scarce means in different scenarios.

More relevant than the disappearance of the jihad prophet is the fact that his ideological discourse loses weight in the Muslim world. Neither bin Laden nor al-Qaida has played a role in successful popular revolutions or in the progress of many Arab countries. The Islamic narrative has been marginalized in the wake of a people who fight, die and long for dignity, freedom, and democracy, all cursed by bin Laden and his followers.