Reports have surfaced that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in an air assault on his compound last week in Pakistan by American Special Operations forces. Military officials waited in order to confirm his identity using DNA tests.
While folks may be quick to put on their party hats and pull out the champagne bottles, the harsh reality is that Osama bin Laden's death changes nothing. bin Laden was a mastermind behind al Qaeda, he built a complex transnational (or multinational depending on how you look at it) franchise based organization that looks a whole lot like McDonalds. It has a chain of command, independently operating cells across North Africa, Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, southern Asia, Europe and presumably the United States. It is the Quetta Shura (located in Quetta, Pakistan), not al Qaeda that is running the insurgency in Afghanistan. Independent cells across the world will still continue to strike, as they did a few days ago a few days ago in a crowded marketplace in Marrakesh, Morocco.
The war in Afghanistan, which is now about nation building and fighting the Taliban (and what few al Qaeda fighters are still there), will continue. There will not be any mass surrenders of al Qaeda fighters, nor will there be any great armistice. This conflict will simply continue on.
Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader in Vietnam that led the fight for unification under Communist rule died of natural causes midway through the Vietnam War. Four years later, the United States threw in the towel. Six years later, Vietnam was reunified under Communist rule.
Hopefully history will not repeat itself.
