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On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.
The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.
Within days of the murderous assault, the then president, George W Bush, had begun framing the US response as a global “war on terror”, a clumsy, inappropriate and counterproductive strategic choice.
For those of us reporting on the ground during this period – watching US bombers over Afghan mountains and tanks in Baghdad streets, interviewing aspirant suicide bombers or the victims of attacks by extremist groups that proliferated from the UK to the Philippines – the errors and failures of this “war on terror” were glaring.
This unprecedented and indiscriminate series of campaigns would lead to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, involve torture, renditions and alliances with dubious regimes, cost huge amounts of money, destabilise swathes of the Middle East and bring suffering to millions of people.
Was this what Bin Laden had hoped to achieve?
It is frequently suggested that Bin Laden’s aim with the 9/11 attacks was to draw the US into wars that would weaken its economy and lead to its eventual collapse, much as the Soviet Union had been fatally drained by the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. As a young militant, Bin Laden had witnessed this conflict and even participated in it, albeit in a marginal role.
But there is little evidence to back this theory up. Though Bin Laden was undoubtedly inspired by the earlier conflict, he rejected as unrealistic his aides’ warnings that the planned attack would bring US troops to Afghanistan, probably expecting little more than another barrage of ineffective missiles by way of reprisal. Certainly, he had no plan when the US troops did come. Within months of the attacks, shaken al-Qaida members described “misfortune [and] disaster”.
In reality, Bin Laden had a different strategy. He wanted to weaken the US economically and consequently force a withdrawal from the Middle East, not an invasion. In 2004, he boasted that al-Qaida was “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”, and that every dollar the group spent attacking the US had cost Washington a million dollars in economic fallout and military spending. This lecture in the advantages of asymmetric warfare resonates today, but was wildly optimistic.
The most costly single event to the US would have been another successful major attack. This never came – an unarguable success of US policymaking since 9/11 and a major failure for al-Qaida. And despite the obvious economic problems in the US, no one could argue that the country has suffered a similar fate to the USSR. Nor, obviously, has it withdrawn its forces from the Middle East.
A second objective of Bin Laden was to force the US to end its support for all the rulers in the region that the once-privileged, Saudi-born dissident so hated, starting with the al-Saud family.
Some of Bin Laden’s targets have been felled since 2001, but not by his actions or by anyone aligned with his vision. Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed by western-backed rebels, Saddam Hussein was ousted by the US, and the Assad dynasty’s rule was ended by an al-Qaida veteran who explicitly disavowed the group’s ideology and agenda.
A third aim of Bin Laden was propaganda. His theatre of terror was designed to send a bloody, spectacular and unforgettable message that would radicalise his followers, mobilise new ones and divide communities. He emphasised how attacks such as 9/11 were “just reactions to what’s happening against our children in Palestine, in Iraq, in Somalia, in southern Sudan, in Kashmir”, and called for a global uprising of Muslims against their enemies.
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While the 9/11 attacks undoubtedly focused international attention on the conflicts in which Bin Laden saw Muslims as oppressed by the west or its allies, it brought no significant improvement for the victims. The wave of support for Bin Laden and broader interest in extremist Islamism peaked only a few years after 2001, and then quickly ebbed more or less everywhere. Shortly before he was killed by US Navy Seals in Pakistan, Bin Laden was contemplating a rebrand of al-Qaida, its name tarnished by growing criticism within the Islamic world that it was responsible for killing large numbers of Muslims. His successor, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, gave up on the uprising altogether, pivoting to a strategy prioritising the local over the global.
If in 2014, in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State was able to capitalise on the chaos left by the US invasion, sectarian tension and much else to establish its appalling caliphate, even this was over by 2019.
Since then, such groups’ brand of extremism has been confined in large part to the periphery of the Islamic world, and to zones from which the threat to the developed world is intermittent at best. Al-Qaida and the Islamic State have expanded most effectively in sub-Saharan Africa, exploiting anarchy, failed states, demographic pressures, communal competition for scarce resources and the inattention of the west.
Some analysts add together the presumed strength of groups in Somalia or Mali that have very loose, historic links to al-Qaida, and warn that their total membership is higher than those loyal to Bin Laden in 2001. But these few thousand young men with AK-47s have little in common with the organisation Bin Laden led 25 years ago, both in aims and capabilities.
There are still appalling attacks inspired by Bin Laden’s twisted ideology, and there will undoubtedly be more. This is in part due to the polarisation brought about by his violence and the reaction to it – as was his aim.
But it is noteworthy that neither al-Qaida nor IS have prominent charismatic leaders. One reason is that any such figure will be swiftly killed by the vastly more capable US, making identification risky. But it is also because the era when such individuals could command a significant following is over.
It is often said that for an insurgent or terrorist group to win, it merely needs to survive, but there are exceptions. That al-Qaida still exists is an achievement of sorts for the group and, posthumously, for its founder. But it should not be described as any victory.
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Jason Burke is the Guardian’s international security correspondent and the author of The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s
