We’ve killed Osama bin Laden. Good. The man was, when all is said and done, an unrepentant mass murderer.
But what difference will his death make? The answer is far from clear.
Will bin Laden’s exit discourage Al Qaeda members? Or will his death at U.S. hands elevate him into a martyr? Will his absence have any impact on Al Qaeda’s operations? Or has Al Qaeda become so decentralized an organization that bin Laden’s death will make little or no day-to-day difference? Will his departure create a vacuum into which another, perhaps more effective, Al Qaeda leader will now step?
The unfortunate truth is that it will be months, not weeks, before we have even a tentative sense of how bin Laden’s death will affect the terrorist threat facing the United States.
Perhaps the most important result of bin Laden’s death will be a domestic political one. Will it give the Obama administration a window to change course on our Afghan policy? Rightly or wrongly, President Obama will be perceived as succeeding where his predecessor did not. Will he seize the opportunity to declare
“mission accomplished” and extricate the United States from a war that is now over twice as long as U.S. participation in World War II?
Probably not. Wars take on their own momentum; they create their own constituencies; they drive their own logics. President Obama has a huge investment in the Afghan War dating back to the 2008 election, when he stressed his support for it; given an opportunity early in his administration to alter our approach, the president chose to expand, not curtail, the U.S. military presence there.
In short, Osama bin Laden’s death may matter far less than we may think.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.