While international attention is captivated by the high profile victory in Abbottabad, such a focus threatens to divert our focus from the underlying factors that have pushed Pakistan to the front lines of the "war on terrorism".

The slaying of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is expected to prompt the United States and China to review strategies to shore up their influence in Asia.

Osama bin Laden was a powerful man, although he used it for vicious ends. He had hard power, the power of explosives and kamikaze strikes, but he also had soft power, the ability to turn young people into ruthless suicide bombers. The most fearful part of Bin Laden's strength is not his unpredictable way to launch terrorist attack, but the charisma that united anti-US forces from all over the world.

When she was appointed as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in 2005, Hughes was put in charge of trying to improve the perception of America abroad. "One of the things that we worked in public diplomacy to highlight around the world was the fact that a lot of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's victims were, in fact, innocent Muslims."

After digesting the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by a U.S. Navy Seals team, my first thought was about how his death, and the manner in which it happened, highlights the tension between the visible and the invisible in terms of terrorism and counterterrorism.

In recent years, the tendency has been to dismiss Guantanamo as nothing more than a public diplomacy disaster. But it appears, and this is not information that suits the Obama administration’s political purposes, that the vital tip that started this whole process came from someone detained at Guantanamo.

In a dramatic, yet sober, Sunday night address to the American people, President Obama announced the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. He reminded us of the horror, the grief, the tragedy and senseless slaughter of September 11, 2001.

A prominent Muslim leader says he expects the death of Osama Bin Laden to usher in a new, positive era of U.S.-Muslim relations, helping Americans to distinguish extremist terrorists from the mainstream Islamic faith.