Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

Most Muslims don't want to live in some Taliban-style utopia, which is what bin Laden and allied groups are offering.

So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

Often it is important to listen to what people aren't saying.