A targeted assassination that will change little in Afghanistan

After the death of Osama bin Laden, what next for the war in Afghanistan, the fight against terror, the upheavals across the Arab world?

In Afghanistan, much of what is happening on the ground is unlikely to change. Bin Laden and 9/11 were the original reason for Allied intervention, to rid the place of al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Now that the terror chief has gone, it doesn't mean a swift withdrawal of UK and US troops, as David Cameron made plain today, because the campaign and its objectives have changed.

The Taliban summer offensive, already under way, will take little notice of al Qaeda and the fate of its founder. There is now a chance that the more nationalist Taliban, openly or privately, will renounce al Qaeda and take part in talks to join some sort of broad-based government. This won't mean the 2014 deadline for US and UK combat troop withdrawal being brought forward. The real objective now is to stop Afghanistan falling into chaos, becoming a huge, anarchic narco-economy after Allied withdrawal. A lot of that will depend on Pakistan.

The most worrying immediate question thrown up by Bin Laden's demise is that Pakistan claims not to have known the man responsible for thousands of Pakistani deaths was living near its top military school. This is either a tacit confession of breathtaking economy with the truth, or of incompetence. This will have to be watched.

The good news is how marginal and irrelevant Bin Laden and his message of theocratic and bloody totalitarianism are to the protesters in the "youthquake" - the Arab Spring protests. For he and his men have hated their democracy as much as Mubarak, Saleh, Assad and Gaddafi. Two warnings, however: in death even the biggest monsters become martyrs; secondly, targeted assassination may be surgically swift, but politically it can be a blunt instrument. It may be fine for dealing with a Bin Laden -there was little alternative. But this success should not be used as an argument to launch sucwh an operation against Gaddafi.

Instead, the Libyan followers need to be convinced to accept change - if their country is not to disintegrate altogether.