Bin Laden? Still Dead. Now What?

The West must now contend with an unpredictable reaction to bin Laden's death, not to mention three wars, Arab uprisings, and Pakistani intransigence.

It's been four days since Osama bin Laden bit the bullet. With that chief goal in the War on Terror now achieved, where U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world heads now is uncertain. The Economist suggests bin Laden's death and the Arab Awakening mean “Islam stands its best chance in generations of re-engaging with politics to found institutions in which religious and civil life can coexist.” Polls from the region highlight precipitous drops in support for terrorists, and “despite years of bloody strife, the western way of life has continued to encroach on Muslims,” the magazine says, and the best way to further that momentum is to support the various uprisings while prodding leaden dictators aside.

Of course, that future doesn't preclude terror attacks in the near term, Richard Haass writes for Al Jazeera. “Indeed, it could even grow somewhat worse in the short run, as there are sure to be those who will want to show that they can still strike against the West,” says Haass. Somalia, Mali, and Pakistan all continue to provide refuge for extremists, while their neighbours rise up against oppressive regimes. The key, then, is to engage those young, largely unemployed males who make up the bulk of both protesters and jihadists. “There is a greater chance than before that young people will become more integrated in their own societies,” says Haass, “if they enjoy greater political and economic opportunity.”

But helping Arab governments and their constituents to realize those opportunities could be mitigated by a decade of kowtowing to onerous U.S. demands, warns Richard Falkenrath in Foreign Relations. “It is possible that bin Laden’s death will come to be seen as the end of the golden years of counterterrorism, an aberrational decade in global politics in which national governments co-operated as never before to deal with a sub-state transnational threat,” says Falkenrath. Ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan and flip-flopping support for deposed despots such as Hosni Mubarak do little to burnish U.S. leverage with stubborn governments. With those prospects, killing bin Laden “may well come to be seen as one of the easiest decisions [Barack] Obama had to make in his first term.”