AFTER OSAMA

The world’s most wanted man, public enemy number one- Osama Bin Laden is dead.  There are few who believe that Bin Laden died in 2002 of some disease and since Obama was worried about the upcoming US Presidential elections in 2012, the billions of dollars being wasted in Afghanistan (The cost of running the war in Afghanistan is $400,225,824,340 and the cost of running it in Iraq was $787,878,147,208 totalling almost 1.2 trillion dollars) and finding a face saving solution to the problem, he declared Bin Laden's death now, (and buried his body hastily in the sea!) Regardless of whether Bin Laden died in 2011 or 2002, one thing is for certain, that he is dead or else, the world's most powerful man would not have taken the liberty of making a claim that he knew was false.

The jubilations on the streets of USA, ecstatic tweets and posts celebrating America’s revenge for 9/11 certainly sing of justice and retribution. But saying that USA has killed the world's most dangerous man, and in doing so, completely smothered terrorism, is way too far-fetched. Here are a few things that will not happen as a consequence of Bin Laden’s death -

             1) Terrorists across the world will give up their violent ways due to the loss of their supreme spiritual leader.

2)    Al Qaeda will be completely incapacitated as Bin Laden was personally instructing each and every terrorist across the world.

3)    The ‘random’ airport passenger searches will now be actually random.

4)    Democracy will be instored across the middle-east.

5)    President Obama will resist the urge (and succeed) to use this accomplishment during his 2012 presidential campaign. (going from far-fetched to dreamy)

Simply killing Osama bin Laden does not end Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian No. 2, has long played a crucial role as Al Qaeda’s COO. And Al Qaeda is more of a loose network than a tightly structured organization. AQIM, the version of Al Qaeda in North Africa, is a real threat in countries like Mali and Mauritania, and killing bin Laden will probably have negligible consequences there. The AQIM terrorists may admire Osama and be inspired by him, but they also are believed to be largely independent of him. And Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda-linked terrorist in Yemen, likewise won’t be deterred by bin Laden’s killing. With Osama being gone, it might be a moral-buster for the Taliban, but it leaves a big, open hole in their chain of command, one that will be too easily and eagerly filled by another.

The only sure-shot repercussion of Laden’s death,  is a bump in Obama’s poll numbers, and a spate of articles, blogs and pieces in the media celebrating the president for heroically keeping the promise of killing the diabolical Osama. Although Obama’s cashing in on this operation for a re-election boost is funny, since the intelligence that led to this raid was directly tied to Guatanamo bay, enhanced interrogations and water-boarding; while Obama has been trying to shut down guatanamo bay for three years and he has been a vocal critic of enhanced interrogations. Also the fact that Obama was unsure of the military operation undertaken to kill Osama Bin Laden, and had to sleep on it for 16 hours- to make a decision any American would have made in a heartbeat.

Yet the political mileage gained from Bin Laden’s killing could be short-lived for Obama, because in America, it all comes down to the economy. (Case in point: George HW Bush was a hero after the victory in the gulf war in 1991, but was defeated in Nov 1992 by Bill Clinton, owing to economic downturn) With the nation’s economy still ailing, higher prices at gas pumps and grocery stores, unemployment still at 9%, unpopularity of the new Health-care bill and billions of nation’s wealth still being spent in waging (meaningless) wars, Obama would have to do much better than winning a Nobel prize, claiming the spoils of Bin Laden’s death, giving another canned speech from a teleprompter, and running an interesting social media campaign.

Speaking of social media, the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death may have been first spotted on twitter, even before the official announcement. One man even live tweeted the raid which killed the Al Qaeda leader, not realizing the monumental news at hand. Some were as usual clueless about such happenings like @parishilton who tweeted- “Can't wait to get home to my pets. I miss my babies," as the world watched, celebrated and tweeted about Osama’s death.

End of terror or not, as a final act of terrorism, Osama certainly blew up the news feeds, posts, tweets and Obama’s ratings!