How al-Qaeda Ended

Al-Qaeda has ended. The organization that Osama bin Laden founded and led, that attacked the United States 25 years ago and killed 2,977 innocent Americans in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania, no longer survives—and U.S. officials should say so, instead of burnishing the group’s legacy by acting and speaking as if it still exists. Terrorism has not ceased, jihadism has not gone away, and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran may ignite more anti-American sentiment and violence. But the group that attacked the United States on 9/11 is finished.

In the years following that assault, thousands of Americans dedicated their lives to avenging the victims. The nationwide horror of watching planes go into towers—innocent people crushed, burned, or jumping to their deaths—catalyzed a passionate response. And the cost to those who responded was high: in the post-9/11 wars, more than 15,000 U.S. military members and contractors died in combat, and some 1.8 million became disabled. And from 2012 to 2021, four times as many active-duty or veteran military members died by suicide as died in combat. Service members from loyal U.S. allies, especially Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, joined the United States in combat; hundreds of them died fighting alongside Americans. They and their families deserve to know their efforts were not in vain. Washington and its allies lost the war in Afghanistan but succeeded against al-Qaeda.

Jihadist terrorism persists as a threat, and not every group using the name “al-Qaeda” has been neutralized. Dangerous organizations operate in the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the Sahel, and South Asia. They carry out attacks and hold territory, and some have come close to taking down governments, especially in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. Jihadists of various stripes train in Taliban-governed Afghanistan—a development that must be closely monitored. But none of what are sometimes called “al-Qaeda affiliates” is centrally directed or led by bin Laden’s organization, and officials should cease suggesting they are, since doing so inflates the threat they pose without making it any easier to combat them. Indeed, it would be best to cease using the term “al-Qaeda affiliate” altogether.

Studying the pattern of attacks tied directly to al-Qaeda shows how the central organization ran out of steam. Before 9/11, the core al-Qaeda organization kept up a steady pace of global operations against U.S. targets, with a track record that included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (six dead, more than 1,000 injured), the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers (19 killed, hundreds injured), the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (224 killed, thousands injured), and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole (17 killed). After 2001, core al-Qaeda’s efforts against the U.S. homeland included a fumbled 2001 attempt to ignite a bomb placed in a shoe on an airliner bound for Miami and a failed 2009 suicide bombing plot targeting the New York City subway. The group caused more pain for U.S. friends and allies than for the United States itself, with deadly attacks in Bali in 2002, Riyadh in 2003, and London in 2005. But following that spike in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the momentum shifted to other jihadist groups, and after 2009, core al-Qaeda’s global operations essentially ceased.

For decades, I have studied how terrorist groups end, based on a dataset of 457 terrorist campaigns and organizations going back a century. By analyzing their makeup, targets, and intended audiences, one can identify common trajectories. Although not mutually exclusive, there are six major pathways such groups ultimately take: decapitation, negotiation, success, failure, repression, and reorientation to another mode of operation (such as ordinary criminality or insurgency). In the case of core al-Qaeda, although decapitation and military repression played important roles, the group ended primarily through strategic failure—just as bin Laden feared it would.

A MOVING TARGET

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. campaign should have been focused on destroying the perpetrators. But the United States failed to clearly define the threat. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed on September 14, 2001, did not mention al-Qaeda at all, instead vaguely identifying Washington’s enemies as “those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” A few days later, President George W. Bush echoed that framing. “Our war on al-Qaeda begins with al-Qaeda but it does not end there,” he declared. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

With that, the United States declared war on a tactic, one that had shaped political violence in the modern world since anarchist terrorism swept through Europe before World War I. Washington had set itself a task it could never accomplish. Making the enemy “terrorism” meant its efforts would lack clarity and drag on endlessly. What followed was an ill-focused campaign in Afghanistan (which removed the Taliban from power in Kabul but allowed bin Laden and his cronies to escape) and then the war in Iraq, where al-Qaeda had not even operated until an affiliate emerged after the U.S. military occupation had been in place for a year. The invasion of Iraq did more to prolong the life of al-Qaeda than any other single event, drawing fresh recruits from Sunni populations all over the world, and eventually creating the conditions for the emergence of the Islamic State organization.

Still, in the 25 years that followed, sometimes almost despite itself, the United States along with its allies did defeat bin Laden’s al-Qaeda—often with inadvertent help from the group itself. An important factor was the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, an event that undermined al-Qaeda’s coherence. U.S. forces stormed bin Laden’s compound, killed him, and then helicoptered his body to an aircraft carrier and buried it at sea, leaving no possibility for a memorial or focal point for his followers. The documents recovered in that raid were just as valuable to U.S. counterterrorism as bin Laden’s death, offering compelling evidence that he had not been centrally directing the group’s operations for some time. His death did not end al-Qaeda, but it was justice served, and it undercut the ability of his fans to rally around him.

By September 2011, U.S. officials were claiming that the number of surviving people directly connected to carrying out the 9/11 attacks was no more than a couple of dozen. But instead of declaring victory over the group at that point and moving on, the U.S. drone campaign, which had begun in 2002 under Bush and accelerated in the early Obama administration, expanded its scope and target set. Instead of so-called personality attacks (which target known leaders), the campaign shifted to “signature strikes,” targeting unidentified individuals or groups who fit a particular profile, not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan but also in Somalia and Yemen. The drone campaign degraded al-Qaeda’s ranks and avenged attempted attacks—for example, by eliminating members of al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate who trained and equipped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be “underwear bomber” who tried to bring down a civilian airliner in 2009. But drone attacks also catalyzed terrorism: according to declassified FBI interviews, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev (likewise inspired by al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate), told a friend that his killing of an eight-year-old in that attack was justified because children in Afghanistan and Pakistan had been killed by U.S. drones. The drone campaign had a strategic impact on U.S. allies: public attitudes in France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom hardened against Washington’s “global war on terrorism.” Drones were tactically important and probably saved lives, but they did not end al-Qaeda.

More critical to that success was intelligence and law-enforcement collaboration among U.S. allies, which remains the bedrock of American counterterrorism. New measures to curb terrorist financing, biometric screening and databases, and new ways of sharing intelligence among allies helped Washington monitor threats beyond American shores. In 2006, for example, close cooperation between U.S. and British intelligence services thwarted an al-Qaeda-linked plot to smuggle the explosive TATP in beverage containers and take down U.S.-bound civilian aircraft over the Atlantic.

THINGS FALL APART

But much of the damage al-Qaeda suffered was self-inflicted. A key driver was a backlash against terrorist attacks that hurt Muslim civilians and a resulting loss of support among communities al-Qaeda supposedly represented. Bin Laden knew this was a weakness, and his frustration shows in the communications discovered in the Abbottabad compound. A May 2010 letter he wrote to one of his deputies warns, “This is when we lose the perception of the Muslims towards us, which is that we are the ones defending the Muslims and fighting their biggest enemy, the Crusader Zionist alliance…[and instead] killing those that the general public consider Muslims.” Al-Qaeda started building global franchises in 2004, but they typically emerged out of existing organizations, and their operational ties to core al-Qaeda could be hazy. According to bin Laden’s own assessment, rogue affiliates hurt al-Qaeda’s cause more than they helped it, since most victims of their violence were Muslim civilians, whose families and communities then blamed al-Qaeda. According to the Pew Global Attitudes project, between 2003 and 2011, support for bin Laden personally had dropped in Indonesia from 59 percent to 26 percent, in Jordan from 56 percent to 13 percent, and in the Palestinian territories from 72 percent to 34 percent. In Pakistan, where bin Laden was hiding, support for him plunged from 46 percent in 2003 to 18 percent in 2010. A decade after 9/11, bin Laden’s dream of a vanguard uniting Muslims had evaporated.

Internal divisions also played a role in al-Qaeda’s demise. The most dramatic split was with the Islamic State, or ISIS, which had started out as an al-Qaeda affiliate before rebranding. In 2014, ISIS conquered major parts of Iraq and Syria, drawing some 15,000 foreign fighters from 80 countries to join its self-declared caliphate. This was a huge challenge to the original group: al-Qaeda had ideas, but ISIS had territory.

ISIS’s trajectory reflected the core problem of dealing with affiliates who did not share (or necessarily even grasp) bin Laden’s strategy. In 2005, bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the leader of what was then known as al-Qaeda in Iraq and would eventually become ISIS—advising him to stop killing Shiite civilians and beheading hostages in grotesque videos. “Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable … are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages,” Zawahiri wrote. “We don’t need this.” Zarqawi ignored him. In 2006, a U.S. airstrike killed Zarqawi. But for the next decade, global jihadism shifted firmly in his direction, and against the comparatively more cautious approach of al-Qaeda.

Even as ISIS swamped al-Qaeda, however, the limits of its approach became clear, vindicating Zawahiri’s warning. The first mistake ISIS made was to gather forces and materiel in a concentrated space, becoming a perfect target for conventional military force. Its second error was to enthusiastically embrace gruesome forms of brutality and sadism, antagonizing virtually everyone who did not belong to the group; by 2016, almost the entire world had united against it. Working with Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian forces, a global coalition to defeat ISIS had by 2019 recaptured the territory the group had seized and destroyed the caliphate. But for al-Qaeda, the damage had been done: it had lost its foothold in Iraq and split its recruitment base with a younger, flashier brand. Zawahiri’s response was to decentralize and focus on groups in South Asia and North Africa, such as al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which primarily sought to overthrow local governments.

In July 2022, nearly a year after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, a U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed Zawahiri. The muted response to his death confirmed the weakness of core al-Qaeda. Today, the apparent head of al-Qaeda is Said al-Adel, who lives in Iran, a Shiite-majority country where, for a decade after 9/11, he and other al-Qaeda leaders and their families spent years living under a form of house arrest, and where his room to maneuver remains strictly limited. He has not even declared himself the group’s leader, perhaps because he fears assassination—but perhaps because there is, in reality, nothing for him to lead.

Although the group could one day reinvent itself or carry out attacks sponsored or abetted by Iran, the al-Qaeda that attacked the United States 25 years ago has ended. The United States sometimes accelerated and sometimes slowed the group’s demise. But ultimately, al-Qaeda failed.

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