Fait accompli


So, Obama got Osama. Or rather Navy Seal Team Six did.

...

So what?

The war against terror is a war of terror waged against civilians and counterrevolutionaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups stand for is of course well out of order, but it is not our place to go in there and tell them so. The efforts of countless western countries to establish pro-western democracies in the Middle-East has failed time and time again. Our laws and our ways are not the ways of Iran or Afghanistan or Iraq. For change to matter, it must come from within. Even if it's crushed, like the efforts in Syria are currently being crushed without international outcry, it does not make the change any less true. History books are full of crushed attempts at change; every single crushed revolution means another one in the future.

Revolutions will always provoke counterrevolution. When the change is being implemented by a foreign power, the people will get a patriotic reason to stand up against it even if it were a better way. Sovereignty of nations relies on this principal that the people in a nation are responsible for themselves and that no other nation may barge in to say what should be done next. Unfortunately, this utopistic view on things has never been factual. Nations that actively avoid intervening in other nations' internal affairs are sidelined as unimportant.
If the people themselves rise up and call for change, it will be much more focused and it will reveal the true colours of the government and civil servants. No matter how it ends up, the seed has been planted. This can be seen in the republican revolutions that started off the French Revolution, the American war of independence, the socialist revolutions across the globe after the February and October Revolutions of Russia, the wave of independence in former colonies, the dissolution of apartheid, and to no small part in the Fascist movement in Italy, Austrian and Germany.
If the people are unhappy, they will show it and join together when you push them too hard.

Never has the killing of one person ended a powerstruggle. Julius Caesar was murdered in an effort to save Rome from becoming an autocracy, only to be followed by Emperor Augustus crowning himself to head Rome.
We can expect only few changes to how Al-Qaida and the Taleban conduct themselves in the near future. Why? Because Osama has not been in tight control for years. He has been hiding, unable to operate due to the manhunt. The true power lies elsewhere and this power remains unchanged. The only thing to change is the whitewash of the inability to locate Osama sooner and the declared martyrdom of Osama.

What's done is done. There is no way to change that.