Osama Dead?

Osama bin Laden, charismatic founder of al-Qaeda, died of typhoid earlier this month in Pakistan, according to a highly classified intelligence brief given to the King of Saudi Arabia and President Chirac this week, and leaked to the French newspaper L'Est Republicain.

The chief of the terror group was known to have been suffering from acute typhoid and seeking treatment in Pakistan in mid-August. This was picked up and tracked by Saudi intelligence services. The same sources, said by the French to be very reliable, believe he later died.

The powerful Pakistani intelligence Agency the ISI at times virtually a parallel government, instrumental among other things in founding the Taliban - has not confirmed the report. "We have no information on Osama's death," a senior Pakistan Interior Ministry official said on Saturday morning.

Bin Laden last appeared on video in 2004. A few poor-quality audio tapes purporting to be of his voice surfaced earlier this year - but it was impossible to say when the original recordings were made.

The reaction of the bin Laden command cell of al-Qaeda to the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks was surprisingly muted and unfocused. It said al-Qaeda would attack "American targets" again, and that all Americans should "convert to Islam".

It is now clear that most of the talking, and broadcasting, by the old command cell has been done by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, spokesman and ideologue for bin Laden and always seen as his Number 2. The highly articulate doctor came to the surface in the security operations following the assassination of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. He can only exist in the shadow of the magnetism of bin Laden and is not seen as a leader or strategist in his own right.

Much the same goes for the al-Qaeda movement as a whole. Like other, admittedly smaller, terrorist groups such as Italy's Red Brigades, it has found it hard to reprise its big spectacular. It has never done anything like 9/11 since. Attacks like the Bali and Mombasa bombs, the train and transport bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in July last year may have been carried out in the name of Islamic revolution - adopting the al-Qaeda logo as it were - but
they were not under bin Laden's direct command.

The attacks appear to be loosely linked homegrown efforts whose ideological and operational roots are in Pakistan and Bangladesh as much as in the bin Laden training camps in Waziristan and Kashmir.

The death of bin Laden, if it is confirmed, will be cloaked in the propaganda of martyrdom, mourning and revenge. It could also trigger a major rethink of such notions as "Global War on Terror", which is long overdue. It will be a blow to the sloganising of the neo-conservatives - and their notion of the "clash of civilisations" - and to the high-flown rhetoric of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.

It is likely to mean not so much "back to basics" in tackling terrorism, but back to the practicalities of how to deal with terrorists in the real world.