5 Things You Should Know: Osama bin Laden’s death and its impact on U.S. foreign policy
Source: PBS, 5/5/2011
An article by ASP Joshua Foust is featured.
Osama bin Laden was killed Sunday in a daring raid into a wealthy suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan. While there will be a lot of information to process in the coming weeks — bin Laden’s personal history, his impact on global security, the particulars of al Qaeda’s operations and so on — there are, broadly speaking, five key takeaway points when assessing the impact of bin Laden’s death on U.S. foreign policy.
This won’t end the war on terror
While bin Laden was instrumental in al Qaeda’s rise as the world’s most feared terrorist group, he hasn’t had much of a role in the organization’s day-to-day operations for several years. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second in command, handled most of the operational planning. And while al Qaeda relied heavily on its senior leadership during the 1990s, the terror group has been largely decentralized since 2001, and there are now semi-autonomous cells operating in Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, even in Iraq (and hints of cells growing in Europe). Even within Pakistan, the major terror groups — such as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Lashkar-e-Toiba (Let) and others — looked to al Qaeda for inspiration but did not rely on them for training and operations. While bin Laden is dead and gone, his organization and its offshoots are very much alive.
This won’t end the war in Afghanistan
President Obama has said the war in Afghanistan is all about al Qaeda — and while it’s true that al Qaeda continues to set up shop inside Afghanistan — the war in Afghanistan is really about the Taliban. As Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Feliz Keuhn have argued (pdf), the Taliban is very much a separate organization from al Qaeda, and there are signs of a growing division between the groups. If nothing else, the senior leaders of the Taliban (Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and others) do not take marching orders from al Qaeda. Even with bin Laden gone, the war against the Taliban (and its justifications) remains.
