US ended bin Laden's life; Muslims had already buried his ideology

For the Arab world, Osama bin Laden’s death marks a line in the sand.

The US president Barack Obama, second left, the secretary of state Hillary Clinton, right, and the vice president Joe Biden, left, along with with members of the national security team, receive an updShow more

A ghost from the past reappears. Osama bin Laden, for so long the spectre who haunted America's dreams, a once potent symbol for millions who was reduced to a fringe figure by the time of the Arab awakening, is dead.

Osama bin Laden: Complete coverage of the killing of the world's most wanted terrorist.

Last Updated: May 3, 2010

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Those who remember him will recall him as he was a decade ago, dressed in white, finger raised to the sky, warning America of the death of its sons. That figure has long since passed into history, a lone voice on the margins of bigger events.

The death of bin Laden is more symbolic than substantive. The September 11 attacks, over and above their impact on the families of the thousands killed and affected by that day, had a searing emotional effect on ordinary Americans. His death brings them some closure, and the US president Barack Obama tried to underline that yesterday by retelling in emotional terms the narrative of that day.

It is to be hoped that the families affected by 9/11 can take some comfort from the idea that the man ultimately responsible for the deaths of their loved ones has himself been killed.

But the reality for America is that the triumph is several years late. Killing bin Laden in 2001 or 2002 would have demonstrated American power. To finally track him down a decade later to a mansion in a country bordering the one they invaded is a lesser victory.

For the Arab world, bin Laden's death comes amid more tumultuous events. It still marks a line in the sand. Al Qa'eda's ideas have run like a cancer through the region and the impact of their actions in New York, Washington and a pasture in Pennsylvania have scarred the Middle East. Neither the Arab world nor America chose this battle, but the region has suffered most from its convulsions.

Across Afghanistan and Pakistan and among the wreckage of Iraq there are millions who fit Mr Obama's description of "children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father, parents who would never know the feeling of their child's embrace".

American bombs and jihadi belts have devastated parts of the region. Without 9/11 to guide American troops into Iraq, that would have not happened.

The death of bin Laden does not end that tragic story, but it closes one chapter. In the hours since the world learnt that bin Laden had been killed, some have claimed a turning point for the Middle East. Arabs, they say, can finally put an unwanted ambassador to rest.

But this was always an outsider's perspective. Since 9/11, bin Laden has been the representation of Arabs to America, but he was never the representative for the majority of Arabs to themselves. He was an anomaly, an apparition, a caricature of a complex region.

Arabs understood that bin Laden was a fragment of their story, not their whole. For al Qa'eda, this is not the end. Bin Laden's death marks neither the end of the movement nor its ideas. Al Qa'eda has fragmented and adapted to life on the run, picking up affiliates and forming loose alliances, with the original al Qa'eda leadership playing an increasingly small part.

Its offshoots in Iraq, in the Arabian Peninsula and in the Maghreb will continue to pose a threat. Whether al Qa'eda as a brand can survive the killing of their unifying figurehead is yet to be seen. Bin Laden's killing does not end the war of ideas in the wider region, either.

That came much earlier, with the Arab Spring being the most recent - and most definitive - refutation of al Qa'eda's atavistic worldview. Their philosophy of violent jihadism was impoverished from the beginning, but still found willing recruits from across the Arab world, South Asia, America and Europe.

The attention first afforded to bin Laden after the September 11 attacks gradually dissipated with each new suicide bombing and grisly tactic. As the broken bodies mounted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Britain and Spain, in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq, his empty vision of the future was laid bare. But it was the Arab Spring that finally laid bin Laden's ghost to rest in the region.

When millions of ordinary Arabs rose up and overthrew two police states, demanding a free future, it was a testament to the power of moral courage, a different tactic to al Qa'eda's vision of violence as the only path to liberation.

This was the victory bin Laden wanted from the start: his genesis as a terrorist began as he came to believe attacking the "far enemy" of America was the only way to end the dictatorial regimes it supported. That goal long eluded him. It was the simple defiant bravery of millions of Arabs that liberated them, not the violence preached by al Qa'eda.

In the end, the death of Osama bin Laden changes little. The Arab Spring killed his ideas in the region and the Americans have followed with his body.