We can say with relative certainty

by Jasoner Lu saler (More on Time.com: See photos of bin Laden s family album)
Here s some of what I wrote in December 2001:
We can say with relative certainty that Osama bin Laden is not right now enjoying the attentions of 70 virgins in paradise. But with the same certainty we can predict that he will live on, years and even decades from now, on the T-shirts, key-chains and calendars of the Muslim world’s  autel maxidas malcontents. Indeed, in the rarefied climes of rebel icons, Bin Laden has become the Islamist Che Guevara.
It was long before September 11 that Osama bin Laden first chose to die. Authoring the most dramatic terror attack in history had simply compressed the timeframe of the inevitable ‘martyrdom’ he first envisaged two decades earlier in the same mountains of southeastern Afghanistan where a simple TKTKTK ended his life on TKTK. The video spectacle of bin Laden cackling ghoulishly over the number of innocents his human bombs had killed in the World Trade Center will underscore the grim satisfaction in the West and among its allies in the east, near and far, at the Saudi terrorist’s ignominious end. But the story of Bin Laden’s rise is a cautionary tale of perils that persist despite the elimination of a man who had, of late, come to personify them.
Bin Laden’s decision to sacrifice his life in  diagun launch service of an implacable pan-Islamic nationalism would likely have been taken two decades earlier, when the pious young Saudi multimillionaire first ventured into Afghanistan.
Back then, of course, he was an American ally, selflessly putting his fortune, his career and even his body on the line to rally Islamic firebrands from all over the world to help wage jihad against the Soviet infidels who had invaded Muslim lands. That effort, covertly backed and orchestrated by the U.S. as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, saw an improbable triumph, as lightly-armed guerrilla forces put to flight the world’s largest conventional army. But it had other, unintended consequences. The Afghan jihad had drawn

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