Pakistani tribesmen march towards transport upon their return to homeland in Jandola, 25 kilometers from Tank on April 30, 2011. Dozens of Pakistani families have returned to South Waziristan with UN and government help to rebuild their lives after major fighting against the Taliban.
Osama bin Laden spent years cultivating his image as the "lion" of Islam who would hobble America. Today, the United States is writing his epitaph as a hapless terrorist who did not return his enemies' fire.
"I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years," John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, told reporters Monday. Al-Qaeda remains dangerous, he said, but today it is "a mortally wounded tiger that still has some life in it."
Is the world a safer place after the targeted killing of Mr. bin Laden? Experts seem cautiously optimistic. In terrorism and counterterrorism, victory does not necessarily accompany any single act of violence. It goes with whomever carves out a winning narrative. For the moment, the United States has the upper hand.
In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, al-Qaeda has lost hundreds of committed operatives, its haven in Afghanistan, and its financial networks. About the only thing it has left is its power to instill fear and to inspire followers. With the death of Mr. bin Laden, the famous Saudi exile who left behind billions to devote his life to armed jihad, those continued capabilities are in doubt.
"I suspect the al-Qaeda senior leadership will splinter… this will create a vacuum," said Marc Sageman, a former CIA analyst and author of an influential 2008 book, Leaderless Jihad.
It's doubtful anyone can fill the vacuum that Mr. bin Laden leaves behind, he said in an interview.
As al-Qaeda leaders became consumed with mere survival, other groups tried to pick up the slack. The Taliban is more entrenched than ever in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Terrorist groups in Yemen, Algeria and Iraq have adopted the al-Qaeda brand. In Somalia, al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists are gaining ground.
The key difference is that none of these groups are as intent and as capable of launching spectacular attacks as al-Qaeda once was. "They really don't have anyone in the West to help and facilitate plots here," Mr. Sageman said.
Consider al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. AQAP has launched two big jetliner plots to date - the failed "underwear bomber" attack in 2009 and a 2010 plot to disguise bombs as printer cartridges.
But AQAP's foiled plans may speak more to relative limitations than to ongoing strengths: A decade ago, "core" al-Qaeda wasn't sending America bombs via FedEx. It had slipped 19 suicide-hijackers-in-training into the United States by embedding them, in some cases for years, as sleeper agents.
Back then, al-Qaeda was still trading off a reputation it had forged when a loose-knit collection of Sunni militants flocked from the Arab world into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the 1980s.
After the Soviets withdrew, al-Qaeda became the most prominent of a dozen militant Arab groups to set up training camps in Afghanistan. This meant Mr. bin Laden had a ready pool of recruits to draw from in the 1990s.
For al-Qaeda, smashing hijacked 767s into the Pentagon and World Trade Center was supposed to usher in a new era of U.S. impotence. Yet even some of Mr. bin Laden's staunchest allies felt this was a fatal miscalculation.
"I believe that the Sept. 11 incident put a dramatic end to the jihadist movement," wrote Abu Musab al-Suri, a fugitive bin Laden associate from Syria, before his 2005 capture. He estimated that U.S.-led forces captured or killed 1,600 of the 1,900 "Arab mujahedeen" trained in Afghanistan within a just a couple of years of the 2001 attacks.
For al-Qaeda, this was beginning of the end. As Mr. bin Laden and his less charismatic No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, went into hiding, they became more fugitive figureheads than operational terrorists.
If the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks cemented al-Qaeda's reputation as a powerful, and elusive U.S. enemy, Americans counterterrorism officials now hope the public will jettison any vestigial mystique as quickly as they tossed Mr. bin Laden's body into the ocean.
"We're hoping that this is going to send a message," Mr. Brennan told reporters Monday. "Terrorism and militancy is not the wave of the future, it's the wave of the past."
Colin Freeze