Bin Laden's Cause Is Still Alive

Exactly a week before the May 2, 2011 raid that claimed his life, Osama bin Laden authored what may have been his last letter. From inside his Abbottabad safehouse, al-Qaeda's chief had watched as Hosni Mubarak and Zain al-Abedin Ben Ali were overthrown; he was convinced that “the fall of the remaining tyrants in the region was inevitable.” Bin Laden wrote: “If we double our efforts towards guiding, educating and warning Muslim people against half-solutions, by carefully presenting [our] advice, then the next phase will [lead to a triumph] for Islam”. In the year since bin Laden's death, experts have debated whether this is something al-Qaeda can in fact do. Earlier this week, the Combating Terrorism Centre at the West Point military academy in the United States released 17 documents recovered from Osama bin Laden's home in Abbottabad — 175 pages of a trove that is reported, though not confirmed, to run into thousands of pages. Like all primary documents, the Abbottabad letters need careful contextualisation and analysis, but do offer a new prism through which bin Laden's mindset, and legacy, can be examined.