Here's the security side of the issue that they are NOT covering very well.
Bin Laden was able to carefully manage the tribal leadership of Al Qaeda factions in over a dozen countries to the point that they have been able to significantly destabilize most of those governments. Those governments, however, have never been particularly strongly aligned with any one philosophy, economic model, or loyalty structure as they have always had very tribal, very family/region-centric social and governmental structures.
Often the regions are controlled by the heroin and opium drug lord/tribal lords who harvest, transport and sell what the locals believe is the most significant natural resource and income stream they have at their disposal. In other regions, Bin Laden was able to fund piracy, organized crime, terrorism, racketeering, and money laundering activities that created and maintained power bases and structures among his key allies.
With Bin Laden's death, the US government position is correct - the message has been sent that the US will pursue its' foes until they are satisfied justice has been done. This undoes some of the extraordinary damage that has been done to US military and diplomatic reputations abroad since the Vietnam War by US pull-outs and other missteps.
The other side of the equation, however, is also equally true; that now, as in the aftermath of the death of Arafat and the deposition of Mubarak, and other Arab leaders, there is a new power vacuum that will definitely produce unanticipated consequences, and will muddy, if not destroy any chances of negotiated peace for a long time to come.
Don't get me wrong; I don't believe for a second that negotiations with Bin Laden would have produced peace of any kind for anyone. What it does though, is that it consolidates all the supporters of his viewpoint into one organization that can be more easily targeted and disassembled as a single group. Once the power vacuum created by his death divides the organization into many competing factions all searching for a leader, for a new power source, the resulting ensuing chaos has the capacity to erupt into hundreds of new, aggressive, power-seeking groups, each capable of doing a significant amount of damage to military and civilian targets, each needing infiltration and human intelligence monitoring in order to prevent attacks and catch the bad guys.
On the plus side, none of the groups has a leader currently as skilled, financially well-backed or politically talented as Bin Laden was, and as long as that remains true, their coordination will erode dramatically and internal political fights will help to unravel the organization as a whole.
One must remain particularly vigilant to the potential that a leader could emerge to take up the support of not only those disenfranchised by the death of Bin Laden, but also those who find themselves in the middle-eastern and African countries now in the hot-bed of upheaval and revolution: Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, etc.
The emergence of a new leader for the region must be very carefully monitored, because the right leader could bring peace and prosperity to the region which it so desperately needs, whereas the wrong leader could prove to be a far greater tyrant than Idi Amin, Stalin or Hitler, and would be in a position to inflict the kind of body count to prove it. Unfortunately we have had a very poor history of predicting which path a potential leader will take in similar situations that have arisen in history; this time we must be ever vigilant and far more careful in our support or opposition as what may appear as cruelty to us may be necessary leadership in their position, and what may appear as great leadership to us may be the sounding of the death knell for millions later.
The power vacuum will also mean that over the next 2-3 years, the world will not be terribly safe as retaliatory and power-play based acts of terror and violence are acted out both here in the US and around the world.
It is a great thing that one of the worst mass-murderers in modern history has been removed from his position of power, and has been stripped of his ability to continue to inflict harm on generations of people from around the world. There will be a continuing price to pay for it, though, and it is a price we must be willing to continue to pay if we are to ever truly be safe.
