The End of Osama

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was captured “dead” in an operation by U.S. forces.

U.S. President Barack Obama declared the death of Osama, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, saying that “Justice has been served.” The president recently announced his bid for a second term of presidency, and his “crazy project” was the Osama bin Laden operation. The al-Qaida leader, who had been sought for the past 10 years, was found in a town one hundred kilometers away from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. After the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was also found in a rural area.

Saddam was caught alive, and was sentenced to death after being tried in Iraq.

Osama was not so lucky!

Yet the U.S. had tried every method including torture on Taliban members detained in Guantanamo Bay to extract every bit of information possible on al-Qaida. In his election campaign, Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo. In addition, different from Bush, he had promised to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the al-Qaida leader had been caught alive, it could have been possible to shed some light on the organization behind the suicide attack on September 11 when planes were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The planes that crashed into the Twin Towers took more than 3,000 innocent lives.

When it was being said that “history was over” with the end of the Cold War, history “came back from vacation” and the world suffered unprecedented terror. Humanity was face to face with “an invisible enemy.”

The Bush administration turned this attack into hegemony towards invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime was taken down.

However, in the 10th year after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. is still looking for an exit from Afghanistan by “settling with the Taliban.” While Obama has put together a plan to “pull out,” he still has not been able to fully shake off Bush’s legacy. It is being defended that the death of Osama bin Laden would cut the ties between al-Qaida and the Taliban, and that it would be a foundation for Islamism in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is open to the U.S. and the West and devoid of radical elements.

Turkish Secretary of State Ahmet Davutoğlu had attended the NATO summit in Kabul last summer and we witnessed the formation of policies of the politicization of the Taliban.

In fact, the U.S. had been supporting the Muslim mujahedeen since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the Gulf War in 1990, these balances shifted and the mujahedeen, who was organized against the Soviets, turned into the Taliban against the U.S. The conditions that bred Osama and the 9/11 attacks hit the U.S. like a “boomerang.”

The U.S. is once more distributing justice in the role of the “global police.”

It was probably known where Osama bin Laden was.

They probably did not see any benefit to keep him “alive,” which is why he was caught “dead.”

The answer to the question “why now?” is not yet known. The falling of Arab dictators may have expedited the process.