The stark truth is this: a decade after 9/11, the jihadist movement is more powerful than at any time in the past. The small group bin Laden built in Afghanistan has flowered. Bin Laden himself, the scholar C. Christine Fair has noted, has emerged as a “kind of Che Guevara of the jihadist movement”: an icon important not for the operational role he played, but an inspirational figure who could figure the imaginations of young recruits. Put another way, bin Laden's death — or, to the faithful, martyrdom — might prove to be his last service for his macabre cause.