The latest in a long line of al-Qaida books aims to gets inside the mind of Bin Laden's nemesis - Barack Obama
A year and a half after Osama bin Laden's death, some of the idea of him has begun to fade. Perhaps it was inevitable, the culmination of a process that had already begun with his confinement in the compound in Pakistan's Abbottabad where he would die, shot down by a US navy Seal team.
The circumstances of that event caused a stir for a while, as it emerged in the account of one of those Seals, the pseudonymous Mark Owen in No Easy Day, that far from taking a weapon to defend himself, Bin Laden, had been shot down. Published only a few months ago, it is significant that Owen's account provides only a few lines and a footnote to Mark Bowden's The Finish.
In death, Bin Laden – or the Pacer, as he was known to US agencies who were hunting him for years, and found him in Abbottabad – has become less interesting than the man who ordered his killing, President Barack Obama, whose war continues.
There have been numerous accounts of Bin Laden's emergence. Endless pages have been written about al-Qaida, both the core group that coalesced around Bin Laden, and the idea of al-Qaida latterly as a franchise, local groups fighting their own local battles.
The Bin Laden of Bowden's account is a man at the end of his murderous trajectory, the victim of his own "success" who had misunderstood with what persistence the US was continuing to pursue him after 9/11.
A while ago, a satirical email emerged purporting to have been written by Bin Laden in his cave, complaining about the habits of his followers. The real communications that Bin Laden sent out to his lieutenants, not least to his increasingly short-lived number threes – his operational commanders – had some of the same tone.
Locked on the third floor of his compound, able to emerge only once a day to walk round the vegetable patch, he sent imperious orders for missions; expressed dissatisfaction about the missed opportunities of the Arab spring; and complained about the fact that the would-be Times Square bomber seemed – ironically – vocally dismissive of the fact he'd broken his oath of loyalty in becoming a citizen of the US. In Bin Laden's view this wasn't quite pukka in an al-Qaida man.
As interesting to Bowden and the reader is Bin Laden's nemesis, Obama, whom Bowden interviews for the book. What he sketches out is perhaps the most detailed picture so far of the US president's views on war and the motives underlying his continuing military engagements, not least his drone campaign.
Bowden describes a telling episode in 2002 when Obama, then largely unknown outside Chicago, was invited to speak at a rally opposing the war with Iraq. Obama said he was against this war, but not all wars in all circumstances, referencing the American civil war and the second world war.
If Obama was different to his predecessor George W Bush, it was in that he believed in negotiation. In the case of al-Qaida and Bin Laden, he took his lead from the philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's rejection of pacifism when confronted with the lessons of Nazi Germany. "As Obama saw it," writes Bowden, "there was no way to defeat al-Qaida so long as its founder and spiritual leader remained at large. He was the soul of the organisation. The president believed that Bin Laden wasn't just evil, he was charismatically evil."
If some in the US intelligence and defence community believed that core al-Qaida was decimated, Obama, in the days after his inauguration, was not convinced. Instead he preferred the analysis of counter-terrorism analyst Bruce Riedel, whom he asked to review the threat, and who concluded that the group was as dangerous as ever.
If Bowden's book is breathless at times in detailing how the hunt for Bin Laden finally unfolded, he does not dodge the more difficult issues. Torture, he makes clear, played a role in assembling the leads that would lead to Bin Laden, not least the hunt for Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, Bin Laden's courier and last protector.
He is critical too of the spinning of the account of the raid itself, not least how it came to be reported early on that Bin Laden was carrying a weapon when in fact he was shot and finished with a coup de grace.
Above all, Bowden provides a compelling insight into Obama's considerations in ordering such missions. As the most prominent figure on what has been dubbed by some as his "kill list", Obama asks repeated questions of his inner circle. Could Bin Laden be captured alive? If he was, then what would that mean? What was preferable for the operation – a missile or a raid? Who would be killed and what might the consequences be, both for his own presidency and for relations with Pakistan?
At the book's conclusion, Bowden asks the president directly about the use of such tactics, specifically his use of special forces raids and drones.
"I think," Obama answers him, "creating a legal structure, processes with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors… There's a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems."
But the use of violence is always messy. And whether Obama is on his way to solving the vexing problem of a certain brand of terrorism through the policies he has adopted, only history will tell.