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SIPA Faculty Analyze the Death of Osama bin Laden
SIPA faculty and alumni are discussing the implications of the death of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind.
U.S. forces killed bin Laden during a raid on Sunday, May 1 at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, just north of the capital city of Islamabad.
Hassan Abbas, Quaid-i-Azam Professor with SIPA and the South Asia Institute, and a former Pakistani police officer, said on MSNBC that the U.S. raid was a huge embarrassment to Pakistani authorities. 
"What was Pakistani intelligence doing all along, if he was so close to them if they couldn’t track him or his associates?’’ asked Professor Abbas in previous interviews with the Boston Globe, the New York Times, New York's WABC-TV, Al Jazeera, WNYC's The TakeAway, and Yahoo News.
Professor Abbas also wrote "Don't give up on Pakistan" for CNN and the Asia Society, where he is a Bernard Schwartz Fellow: "While Pakistan has a reputation as a source of instability in South Asia, it also holds the key to peace in the future... By helping Pakistan remedy its dysfunctions, its friends and allies can help ensure better prospects for all of us." He was also interviewed by the Council on Foreign Relations: "A Low in Cycle of U.S.-Pakistan Ties."
As the financial relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. comes under scrutiny, Austin Long told the BBC that endemic corruption is one of the greatest challenges facing Pakistan's political system.
"Corruption is not at the catastrophic levels of some countries," said Professor Long. "But a proportion of any aid can be considered to have been diverted to other things." Listen to Professor Long's interview here. 
SIPA alumna Maha Hosain Aziz (MIA '05), senior teaching fellow in South Asian Politics at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, writes in BusinessWeek that things will only get worse in Pakistan.
Gary Sick addresses the future of Islamism at his blog Gary's Choices. "Although the killing of Osama bin Laden had great symbolic impact, it pales in comparison to the events of the Arab Spring," writes Professor Sick.
Stuart Gottlieb, who teaches courses on counterterrorism at SIPA, suggested at The Huffington Post that the idea of a Top 10 Terrorist list is outdated. “It might say that an FBI list is anachronistic, and that it has been for a while. The idea of a centralized al Qaeda directing operations has been gone for eight or nine years.”
Professor Gottlieb says the war that began on September 11, 2001 will not end with the death of a dictator or a surrender on a battleship. Writing at Politico's "The Arena," he says "...this war will not be "won" until Al Qaeda's religious ideology is relegated to the dustbin of history."
Alex Burnett, updated May 13, 2011