What Osama Hath Wrought

Thousands killed, curbed civil liberties, and an uncertain future in Central Asia mean bin Laden's legacy will survive for years.

The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs proved cathartic for the U.S. last night, but the task of assessing his toll on the world remains. CBC's Neil Macdonald offers a grim reminder that bin Laden's murder of 3,000 American citizens on 9-11 “showed Americans the price of their liberty, how many of their principles they'd be willing to cast aside, and how quickly they would do it.” Civil liberties lost to the Patriot Act, scapegoated and stereotyped Muslims, and intrusive, ill-advised airport security, to say nothing of the lives lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, leading Macdonald to suggest that “in so many ways, Osama bin Laden died the victor.”

Christopher Hitchens, writing in the National Post, disagrees that bin Laden lived his last years in vainglory, describing a man reduced to irrelevancy. “In the past few years, [al-Qaeda's] main military triumphs have been against such targets as Afghan schoolgirls, Shiite Muslim civilians, and defenceless synagogues in Tunisia and Turkey,” says Hitchens. Measured against the threat of retaliation over bin Laden's death, U.S. President Barack Obama ought not to revel too long. “The uniformed and anonymous patrons of that sheltered Abbottabad compound are still very much with us,” writes Hitchens, “and Obama’s speech will be entirely worthless if he expects us to go on arming and financing the very people who made this trackdown into such a needlessly long, arduous and costly one.”

The aftermath will be felt most by Pakistanis, writes the Guardian's Simon Tisdall, “who are most likely to pay a blood price in terms of revenge attacks for the slaying of a man who is seen by some in the Muslim world as an iconic figure.” And Pakistan's complicity in sheltering bin Laden and other terrorists has now been laid bare like never before with the likelihood “that elements within [Inter-Serivces Intelligence, Pakistan's spy agency] ... did indeed know bin Laden and his retinue were in Abbottabad, and by keeping silent, were effectively providing him with protection.” Terrorist attacks have claimed thousands more lives in Pakistan over the past decade than in the West, and Islamabad's intransigence on that menace means bin Laden's death is yet another hurdle for the nation at the heart of the war on terror to surmount.