The Marines and Brits stationed here barely shrug at the news about Bin Laden.  His lividity is of little matter to the situation in Helmund province, Afghanistan.
 
Are they happy about the news?  Sure.  Satisfied justice was finally served?  Yes.
 
But his death changes nothing here and will change very little, if anything on the ground throughout Afghanistan.
 
Al Qaida has long since become an organization with no need for a leader--even a symbolic one.  In the canal country of the Helmund river, the opium poppies provide more revenue to fuel the Taliban and Al Qaida than Bin Laden's long since spent millions and fund raising.  Opium sloshes billions of dollars around Afghanistan, Pakistan and  the Emirates.
 
The Marines and Brits know this, which is why the news, while welcome and gratifying, is not celebrated with cheers.
 
In my own opinion, killing bin Laden does little more than provide a specious pre-text for a premature withdrawal of NATO/US forces from Afghanistan.  I remember clearly when Zarqawi was killed in Iraq.  The insurgency kept going for 3 more years.  It is not a man we are fighting, it is an idea.

The upper floor of the house converted to an office in Kabul's district three, near the Afghan parliament, was loud, smokey and noteable for those in attendance.

To my left was a member of Afghanistan's Parliment.  Sitting next to him was a former General of the KhAD, Afghanistan's intelligence service during the Soviet era.  To my right were two retired Colonels.  One a retired Spetznas/GRU officer of the Soviet/Russian, the other retired from the Lithuanian Army.

I was the only one not speaking Russian.

The travel writer Paul Theroux recently exhorted readers of the Sunday New York Times to ignore "the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger wagger [who] says of many a distant place, 'Don't go there.'" 
Theroux says his trips to "these maligned countries are the most fulfilling."

Rugged, adventure travel in the nominally dangerous country he says can be life changing, the value of the enrichment only understood after the fact.  [Or in the telling of the stories to impress people at dinner parties.]

Theroux also writes, "I wouldn’t go to present-day Somalia or Afghanistan."

I'm living in a boutique hotel above a Cafe and ranging around the city and outlying areas on foot or in a Toyota Four-Runner the way a tourist on a budget would.

In the 1980s Iran and Iraq fought to a bloody stalemate on a thin strip of desert over access to a waterway, the Shatt al Arab, that had been in dispute since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

The war was a pure fire-power battle resembling the trench warfare of World War I and the set piece charges of the American Civil War.

The tension over the Iran/Iraq border still lingers making border security one of the key missions of US Forces in Iraq.

I spent a day at the Shalamcha Port of Entry, a bustling entry point for Iranian tourists and transhipment point east of Basrah, Iraq.

Every morning hundreds and sometimes thousands of Iranian tourists line up on the Iranian side of the border to enter Iraq.  The tourists arrive in busses, unload, cue up, get their passports stamped then load up in busses on the Iraqi side headed for the holy sites in Karbala or Samarra.

In the afternoon, busses unload tourists heading back to Iran.

Iranian tourists lined up to enter Iraq.

Hundreds of trailer loads of goods also enter Iraq six days a week through Shalamcha.  Tractor trailers park in a load yard on the Iranian side of the border, Iraqi drivers transload the cargo into their trailers, then drive into Iraq where the cargo is weighed, taxed and, at least in theory, inspected by Iraqi customs agents.

Very little cargo is shipped from Iraq into Iran.

The truck gate at the Shalamacha Port of Entry.

Pedestrian lane heading into Iran.

The physical and attitudinal remants of the war between Iraq and Iran still remain.  Firing positions for tanks are still in place and large tank traps still dominate the land scape.

At one time this area had the largest date palm groves in the world, but the land has been stripped bare of vegetation and canal works.

This is a tank trap temporarily filled with water from a rainstorm, not a canal.  The far side is Iran.

The attitudinal remnants of the war physically manifest themselves in the gradual encroachment of Iran at Shalamcha.

In the photo below the green, white and red flag of Iran is only 30 feet from the red, white and black flag of Iraq. Several months ago, the Iranian flag was at the far end of the yellow awning.  If you look closely, on the lower right 1/4 of the photo you can see a metal gate painted green, white and red that is in Iraqi territory.

The Iranian port of entry facilities as viewed from the entry arch to Iraq.

As the clock counts down to the official end of Operation Iraqi Freedom in August when a new phase called Operation New Dawn begins, working with the Iraqi Border Enforcement agency will be one of the key efforts of US Forces in the South and for the 1st Infantry Division. 

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