Fighting terrorists - The greater good was well served

IT’S been over a decade since so many words were written about Osama bin Laden and more than a decade since he came to symbolise everything about Islamic radicalism that is so disquieting and incomprehensible to western sensibilities.

He came from a very wealthy background, he was well educated and though driven by a terrible, debilitating hatred he had a powerful mind and the kind of charisma not unusual amongst evil men. He seemed an unlikely terrorist and that made him all the more easily despised, especially by those who believed that his comfortable background should have been more than enough for him to lead a very different kind of life.

The earliest attacks he organised on American interests — embassies across East Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000 — put him on America’s most wanted list but his central role in the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington made him a dead man walking. He had wreaked carnage at the very heart of the world’s greatest superpower and the consequences were inevitable. It was only a matter of time before he was assassinated. For a multiplicity of reasons — justice, reassertion of American power and national pride, political opportunism, bloodcurdling populism or just straightforward Old Testament revenge — Osama bin Laden was not going to die a peaceful death. It may have taken a decade to neutralise him — use whatever verb you like the result is a corpse — because he was offered refuge in a society ambivalent about his crimes.