Bin Laden's death will affect the Taliban leadership's calculations regarding al-Qaeda and negotiations to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan. Any sense of debt among Mullah Omar and the Taliban leaders, dating back to the assistance that bin Laden gave them in the 1990s, was more to bin Laden personally than to his group. With bin Laden gone, the Afghan Taliban probably feel freer than before to renounce any prospect of future ties with what is left of al-Qaeda. For the Taliban leaders, al-Qaeda now means to them less a former ally in past phases of the civil war and more a source of potential trouble, with shades of the enormous trouble that al-Qaeda caused the Taliban in 2001.

Probably also entering the Taliban leaders' calculations are the implications of the raid against bin Laden for what the United States is able and willing to do to hit targets important to it, even targets nestled deep inside Pakistan. What the United States did at Abbottabad could be done as well at Quetta or elsewhere. This fact may also incline the Taliban leaders more toward negotiations because of reduced confidence in their own security during an indefinite continuation of the conflict. Factoring in the Pakistani military's likely thinking—following the embarrassment of Abbottabad, any reduced leverage of Pakistan against the United States, and what this may mean regarding future hospitality in Pakistan—would make the Taliban leaders even less sure of being able to wage their insurgency indefinitely from havens beyond the Durand Line. In brief, the net effect of bin Laden's death has probably been to improve the opportunities for negotiations to wind down the war in Afghanistan.