Did al-Qaeda Succeed?

Since September 11, 2001, al‑Qaeda has pulled off exactly one fatal attack inside the United States. If you remember the details of that attack, you probably spend too much time thinking about terrorism. On December 6, 2019, in Pensacola, Florida, a 21-year-old Royal Saudi Air Force officer took out a legally acquired Glock pistol and killed three U.S. sailors at a naval air base, before police arrived and killed him. The shooter, an affiliate of al‑Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, had been on the base for flight training. I was in Taif, Saudi Arabia, at the time, and the Saudis I met said they were sorry about the incident but relieved that after 18 years of terrorist R&D, the most ferocious blow al‑Qaeda could strike on the path of jihad was not much worse than the kind of mundane workplace violence that we Americans regularly inflict on ourselves.

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The group yearned to attack America again after 9/11 and had considered several schemes, but only on three occasions before Pensacola had it actually tried to execute an operation. All three plots had failed.

On December 22, 2001, a slovenly thug named Richard Reid tried to blow up a Miami-bound airplane by lighting a bomb concealed in his high-top sneakers. He failed because he could not light the fuse—which had apparently been moistened by foot sweat and rain—and because he tried to light it, striking match after match, in full view of other passengers rather than in the privacy of an American Airlines lavatory.

The next attack would not occur for another eight years. That one, in 2009, resembled the first: A competent bomb maker entrusted his package to a complete moron. On a plane descending into Detroit, a passenger with an explosive charge sewn into his underpants injected a chemical initiator that fricasseed his crotch but left the plane intact. The next year, in a much more formidable plot, al‑Qaeda used FedEx and UPS to send bombs hidden in laser printers on cargo planes bound for the United States. Authorities intercepted the packages. In 2017, the United States killed the bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, in a drone strike in Yemen.

Surviving until 2017, as an al-Qaeda leader, was itself something of an accomplishment. Anne Likuski, the author of Al‑Qaida After 9/11 and a researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, told me the upper echelons of al‑Qaeda had been “eradicated” by 2012—droned into oblivion and replaced by younger jihadists with less experience and credibility. In 2011, Osama bin Laden himself was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and his successor, the Egyptian physician Ayman al‑Zawahiri, was struck by Hellfire missiles on his balcony in Kabul in 2022.

Judging from this streak of incompetence, it is difficult to see al‑Qaeda as anything but a failure. In a November 2002 audiotape, bin Laden posited a ledger of death, and promised that his group would keep it balanced. “The time has come to settle the accounts,” he said. “Just as you kill, so you shall be killed; just as you bomb, so you shall be bombed.” His group murdered 2,977 people on September 11, but in the past 25 years, it has run a serious deficit in its account.

Among terrorism analysts, a prominent school of thought nevertheless holds that the group is the shrewdest and most effective terrorist organization of all time—and that it is more dangerous than ever. Bruce Hoffman, who has been studying terrorist groups since before al‑Qaeda was founded, told me that it was singular in its resilience. “They’ve survived the greatest military onslaught in history ever directed against a terrorist group,” Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. He pointed to the very simple strategy that bin Laden articulated in a 2004 video: wear Americans down and “bleed” them “to the point of bankruptcy.”

“That strategy is working,” Hoffman said. A 2021 Brown University report put the cost of the War on Terror at more than $8 trillion.

This unfathomable investment succeeded in removing al‑Qaeda from the little camps it once controlled in Afghanistan. But these havens have been replaced by large ones elsewhere, including in parts of the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and the Sahel, the arid region of West Africa just south of the Sahara. The al‑Qaeda franchises in those places are ruthless and rich. The East African branch fields a force that has been estimated at 10,000 men and pulls in about $100 million in revenue annually through taxation, smuggling, and outright theft. It gets a taste of almost all commerce in Somalia and has recruited supporters from as far away as Southern California.

“On the ground, these groups are not only winning military victories but also exercising sovereignty and governance,” Hoffman said. Al‑Qaeda’s branch in the Sahel, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (“The Support Group for Islam and Muslims”), sounds like it meets over coffee and stale doughnuts in a church basement. But just this year, trucks bristling with weapons swept across Mali under its banner and nearly toppled the country’s government. Militants associated with JNIM killed Mali’s defense minister in his own home.

If al‑Qaeda halted its attacks on America because it preferred, temporarily, to measure its progress not in American corpses but in square miles of planet Earth, then it has been a roaring success. And it could, Hoffman said, turn back to its old priorities. “The al‑Qaeda concept has taken root,” he said, and has given the group’s leadership—sometimes called “al‑Qaeda core”—the luxury of deciding when to begin killing Americans again. “What worries me is that al‑Qaeda is husbanding its resources to do something in the U.S., and might enlist the franchises to carry it out.”

Worry is an occupational hazard for people who study terrorist attacks professionally. Al‑Qaeda’s resurgence has been predicted for two decades, and so far, no resurgence. Another possibility, rarely uttered for fear of jinxing things, is that sending exploding hoboes onto airplanes 17 years ago was the pinnacle of the group’s post-9/11 powers, and that al‑Qaeda core has been quiet because it has gone the way of RadioShack, Blockbuster, and the Hartford Whalers. It no longer exists, and the affiliates—fearsome though they may be in the deserts where they operate—are just wearing the jersey of a team that folded long ago.

A quarter century after the 9/11 attacks, about half the world’s population is too young to remember them. Those who do will recall both the horror of the imagery—thousands dying on live television, in seconds—and the disorientation of the day. Nobody knew whether the four planes were the only ones, or whether 40 more were hurtling toward other targets. That evening, CNN was speculating that the death toll might be in the tens of thousands.

If fear was the goal: mission accomplished. But fear was the means, not the end. The end was political change. And any assessment of al‑Qaeda, both on 9/11 and in the ensuing decades, should ask whether it leveraged that fear to bring about the political results it sought.

The people who grade bin Laden most generously in this regard focus on how al‑Qaeda persuaded America to poke itself repeatedly in the eye in the years that followed September 11. In 2021, the political theorist William A. Galston awarded bin Laden “a sweeping if posthumous victory” for provoking stupid responses that have distracted, divided, and weakened America. Others, such as the former CIA official Bruce Riedel, have suggested that these traps were bin Laden’s plan all along, and that he wanted to lure the United States into an invasion of Afghanistan and “a long and bloody war of occupation.”

The American capacity for self-harm, at astronomical cost, is at this point undeniable. Equally incalculable is the cost in human life: soldiers and civilians killed during the open-ended hunt for remnants of al-Qaeda, and others who survived but saw their communities destroyed or traumatized. But these costs are evidence of an American defeat, not necessarily a bin Laden victory.

Because bin Laden was a chatterbox and loved giving interviews before he became the most hunted man in history, the record he left of his hopes and strategic thinking is quite complete, and provides a standard—his own—against which to measure al‑Qaeda’s success or failure. To these public statements we can add roughly 6,000 pages of internal documents seized by the United States from the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden spent his final years. These private documents banish any temptation to think of him as a mastermind who predicted each misstep by his enemies and laid traps years in advance.

In 1998, he stated his goals: to “kill Americans and their allies,” and “to liberate al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Holy Mosque in Mecca from their grip, so that their armies leave all the territory of Islam, defeated, broken, and unable to threaten any Muslim.” This theme—the withdrawal of the United States from Muslim land, particularly his native Saudi Arabia, as well as the end of Israel and of American support for Israel and secular autocracies in the Arab world—was consistent in his statements.

Bin Laden was equally clear about how he thought terrorism would yield his desired result. In a March 1997 CNN interview with Peter Bergen, he spoke of transferring “the battle into the United States.” In a May 2000 speech, he told supporters that the war would henceforth be waged “against the United States, in the United States.” Americans, he observed to ABC’s John Miller in 1998, cannot tolerate pain, and will react to attacks not by fighting back and blaming al‑Qaeda, but instead by asking “what their government has done that forced us to defend ourselves.” In a November 2001 interview, he hinted at a theory of political change in America: Its citizens should “take the same stand that they did previously,” when they protested the Vietnam War and the presidents who waged it.

Nelly Lahoud, a professor at the Army War College and the author of the definitive book on the Abbottabad documents, told me this political pipe dream was bin Laden’s whole plan: “to replicate the anti–Vietnam War movement of the United States, to get the American public to put pressure on the U.S. government to withdraw its forces from the Middle East.” The documents reveal a man and an organization blindsided by the American reaction to the September 11 attacks. Bin Laden and his associates “didn’t think that the United States would respond by waging war,” Lahoud said. He did not contemplate or plan for the long-term occupation of Afghanistan, nor did he expect the methodical killing of his operatives in a campaign that lasted years.

For good or ill, American Middle East policy during this period was roughly the opposite of what bin Laden expected and intended. Rather than withdrawing, U.S. forces surged into the region. The United States has troops, and friends, in Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The only Middle Eastern despot the United States abandoned post‑9/11 was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and after less than two years of experimentation with Islamist rule, Egypt switched back to an America-friendly autocrat. In the mid-2000s, Saudi Arabia—whose leaders bin Laden considered tyrants—was a decrepit gerontocracy in regular peril of jihadist revolution. Its current leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is in his early 40s and an ally of the Trump administration. He began his quest to transform his kingdom into a modern state by locking up anyone who had expressed even the faintest interest in jihad.

Bin Laden experienced the 2000s as a series of disappointments. After nine years of continuous hunting of his comrades, and after one of them had ignited his scrotum somewhere over southeastern Michigan, he was ready to concede privately that his theory of political change was ill-considered. “By 2010, bin Laden had to reflect on things,” Lahoud said. Having looked further into the Vietnam comparison, he learned that about 58,000 Americans were killed during that 20-year war. Because Americans were then being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at a rate of about 500 a year, he decided that his allies could not plausibly step up the pace enough to stoke popular outrage in the United States. In one captured document, bin Laden argues that a better strategy would be a financial hit that affected the “income of every American citizen.” He suggests that al-Qaeda consider attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He was developing that plan (clever, come to think of it) around the time SEAL Team 6 shot him in the face.

The evidence that bin Laden was mostly neutralized in the years immediately after 9/11—according to Lahoud, the Abbottabad documents indicate that he was barely in touch with anyone in al-Qaeda from 2002 to 2004—makes for a peculiar contrast with the attribution of strategic genius to him that was occurring during this exact period. He was more Clouseau than Clausewitz. But the United States was at the time preparing to embark on the Iraq War, and perhaps it was difficult to imagine that a folly of such magnitude could be self-inflicted, rather than planned by a Machiavellian enemy.

Bin Laden encouraged this impression. In 2004, when he issued his first video in nearly three years, addressing American voters on the eve of the presidential election, he told them he was planning a war of attrition. He warned them that he intended to bleed them slowly, as al-Qaeda had “bled Russia for 10 years” in Afghanistan, “until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.” (Bruce Hoffman noted that bin Laden was engaging in stolen valor here, because his Arab fighters had been war tourists and the Afghans had done the hard work of fighting the Soviets. “Still,” he said, “it fit the narrative.”)

Publicly, bin Laden made a virtue of necessity and told the world that getting attacked by America was a blessing. But Lahoud is adamant that the Abbottabad documents show the opposite of crafty planning, and instead reveal constant complaining about the very setbacks that al‑Qaeda supposedly welcomed. Privately, bin Laden bemoaned his network’s impotence, lack of money, and inability to mount even small operations. “Al‑Qaeda came up with the ‘war of attrition’ idea afterward,” Lahoud said. “This was not by design.” Those who awarded bin Laden points for strategic genius had fallen for his propaganda.

After bin Laden’s death, al-Zawahiri made attrition the official al‑Qaeda doctrine: to exhaust America and bleed it to death, “so that it meets the fate of the former Soviet Union and collapses under its own weight.” A similarly themed article appeared in The Onion, under the headline “FBI Uncovers al‑Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” It was illustrated by a calm bearded man, relaxing on a sofa with a television remote in his hand. The photo appeared to be modeled on one of the last known videos of bin Laden, channel surfing in a shabby, windowless room.

Bin Laden seemed to have realized that he’d created a debacle for himself and his allies. At one point, he argued that the Taliban was doomed anyway, and that he was therefore blameless for provoking an invasion of the group’s country and the destruction of its regime. “We knew for certain that Afghanistan was already a target, and that America was determined to bring down the Taliban,” he wrote in a document quoted by Lahoud. He and his non-Afghan terrorist crew could hardly be faulted for an American invasion that was already inevitable. “Everything that happened was going to happen even if we did not strike,” he wrote. This ludicrous claim, that George W. Bush wanted to occupy Afghanistan and merely advanced his calendar because of 9/11, is self-serving, Lahoud writes, and “reeks of repressed Arab guilt.”

Whether al‑Qaeda hit upon the attrition strategy brilliantly or simply claimed prescience after the fact is in some ways immaterial. The United States was, in fact, eventually exhausted by protracted war—that is why we fled Kabul in 2021 and handed over the government to the Taliban, with our compliments—and American overreach was predictable even if bin Laden failed to predict it. One could conclude that al‑Qaeda stumbled at first by losing its haven in Afghanistan, but then recovered its composure and played its hand masterfully thereafter. But that, too, would be giving the group too much credit, and would underestimate just how catastrophic the attacks on America were for its cause.

The cause, as of September 9, was going well—in part because of a cunning move by bin Laden, though he unwittingly undid its effect on September 11. Two days before the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden sent two Tunisian suicide bombers, posing as journalists, to kill Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban coalition known as the Northern Alliance. Had he stopped there—killing Massoud and calling off the planes—the trajectory of South and Central Asia, and the future of political Islam, would have been different.

By mid-2001, the Northern Alliance had lost Kabul to the Taliban and had no prospects of recovering it. The group had been pushed into the Panjshir Valley and the rugged northeastern corner of Afghanistan, and with Pakistani help, the Taliban had begun consolidating its gains. For Pakistan, Afghan territory was useful as a base for attacks on India. The videos of al‑Qaeda terrorists swinging from monkey bars in a training camp in Afghanistan before 9/11 made news in the United States. But most campers at sites like these were training to fight in Kashmir. India had no control over or access to Afghanistan, and Pakistan viewed the Taliban as an asset.

What some Pakistani generals saw as a strategic asset, other Pakistanis saw as a religious one. It is difficult to overstate how much hope South Asian Islamists invested in the Taliban’s success. My first acquaintance with the Taliban and its supporters came five months before the September 11 attacks. I was in Peshawar, the Pakistani city just over the Khyber Pass from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Taliban supporters were ubiquitous there that April because members of their sect were holding a jamboree with thousands of attendees. They regarded the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as an epochal event, not so different from the Islamic State’s declaration of its caliphate 13 years later. (Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, called himself “commander of the believers,” a title historically reserved for caliphs.)

At the jamboree, I met men from the Persian Gulf countries, England, and South Asia. (Few were Afghan.) The Taliban itself was an Afghan movement with little knowledge of the world or interest in conquering it. But other Sunni Islamists thought that from these provincial beginnings a state would arise that could incubate a range of Islamist projects. The attendees viewed Taliban-led Afghanistan as a laboratory of conservative Islamic governance, and they considered bin Ladenism a particularly promising and righteous experiment. Outside the conference, I bought a T-shirt that said OSAMA BIN LADEN—GREAT MUJAHID OF ISLAM. It was decorated, in brazen defiance of trademark law, with a Nike swoosh.

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In 2001, the Taliban was, in other words, ceasing to be a merely local movement. Others had plans for the group, and it had tentative plans of its own to seek outside help and lock in its rule. In fact, at precisely the point when al‑Qaeda decided to attack America, the Taliban was seeking international approval—and had a path to getting it. Rateb Popal, an Afghan who had fought in the jihad in the 1980s (he’d lost an eye and an arm in a failed bombing in Kabul) and later ran a security company during the American occupation, told me just how close the Taliban had come.

The United States had ostracized the Taliban for harboring bin Laden and for its human-rights record. But other countries—not just Pakistan—were ready to do business there. I met Popal in Beijing in 2010. He had lived in the United States and served time in a U.S. federal prison for drug smuggling. He was unusually worldly for an Afghan, and when he returned to Afghanistan from the United States, he ended up becoming a liaison to the Chinese. The China Building Material Industrial Corporation, he said, had sent a single intrepid representative to meet with the Taliban in the late 1990s. Kabul was wrecked from years of war. After seeing the rubble, the Chinese sent a group of engineers to determine whether they could open a cement factory—a resource that would be in high demand, if ever the country were to be rebuilt. The Chinese, as usual, were also sniffing around for mining opportunities. In 1999, Popal led the first Taliban delegation to Beijing. They met with company officials and discussed collaboration. “They treated us like VIPs,” he told me. “All halal food.”

By late 2000, China had sent a delegation to Kabul and to Kandahar to see Mullah Omar—a rare meeting between the reclusive Taliban leader and non-Muslims. China’s one political demand was that the Taliban restrain any Chinese Muslim organizations challenging Beijing’s rule in Xinjiang.

“If September 11 didn’t happen,” Popal told me, “the Chinese government would have recognized” the Taliban no later than 2003. The alternative history he imagines is tantalizing. With Massoud gone, he said, “the morale of the Northern Alliance was 99 percent dead,” and the Taliban could have “just walked” into the Panjshir Valley, completed its conquest of the country, and enjoyed uncontested control of Afghanistan. Most countries hated the Taliban—even the Chinese were furious after it blew up ancient stone-cut Buddhas in early 2001—but at some point, any country hoping to do business with Afghanistan would have had no choice but to join Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan in recognizing Taliban rule over the country. With China on board, one of the last barriers to recognition would have fallen, and this jihadist proving ground would have been on its way to enjoying the same official status as Turkey and Luxembourg.

Popal told me that the Taliban was operating at that point “completely separately” from bin Laden and al‑Qaeda, even though they were religiously simpatico. (There is a debate about how closely the Taliban worked with al-Qaeda, or for that matter how well it would have understood the 9/11 plot and its ramifications. The leaders were at least socially close. Popal twice dined with al-Zawahiri, whom his Taliban hosts introduced as “an Egyptian doctor building hospitals.”) The group was eager to clinch its control over Afghanistan, and was in no rush to risk it all to strike a blow against infidels in a distant land. Had bin Laden refrained from attacking America, he might have lived to see his movement nurtured by Taliban rule into a more formidable and mature Islamic power. Formal international recognition became impossible as soon as the Americans determined that al‑Qaeda had committed the atrocity, using Afghanistan as a base. The Taliban is now seeking recognition again. Bin Laden set it back 25 years.

The contention that al‑Qaeda deserves high marks, or even a passing grade, as a terror group must therefore fend off the objections that, for the past 25 years, it has almost completely failed to attack America; its key personnel have been killed off; the war of attrition it apparently stumbled into has failed on its own terms; and its great success, the September 11 attacks, abruptly ended the most promising Sunni Islamist–state project to have been launched since the end of the Ottoman caliphate, in 1924.

The most compelling answer to these objections comes down to one word: franchises. Like a malevolent Ray Kroc, bin Laden and later al-Zawahiri began licensing the al‑Qaeda brand to hitherto independent jihadist organizations far from Afghanistan. In 2004, after overtures from jihadists in Iraq, bin Laden started the process of taking on franchises; it had become clear that the frontier of jihad would be the killing of American soldiers there. Al‑Qaeda received loyalty oaths from the franchises’ leaders and tried to vet them. Bruce Hoffman called this proliferation a “survival strategy” and said it had worked as intended, as a solution to the unrelenting heat that the United States was putting on the core group. Hoffman said bin Laden accepted, reluctantly, that he no longer had a base in Afghanistan, and he established bases elsewhere to hedge against extinction. Those affiliate organizations—in Iraq, North and West Africa (joined in 2007), Yemen (2009), East Africa (2012), and the Indian subcontinent (2014)—have at times misfired, but the successes have paid off handsomely.

Compared with al‑Qaeda core, these groups are nouveau riche. Bin Laden whined for years about a lack of money and fighters. The franchises, particularly in Africa, are flush with men and materiel. Even one of the weaker affiliates, on the Indian subcontinent, is now in an enviable position, with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan and ready to support that group by letting its followers congregate and train within Taliban territory. Neither the United States nor any other country has managed to destroy one of these franchises; indeed, the governments of Somalia and Mali have come very close to falling to them, as have cities in Yemen. In April, fighters affiliated with the Sahel franchise, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, raided Bamako, the capital of Mali, and they continue to control much of the northern part of the country.

Sara Harmouch, a security contractor and terrorism expert who monitors jihadist groups, told me the franchises have learned from the mistakes of al‑Qaeda core. She cautions against assessing al‑Qaeda as weakened merely because it has not carried out attacks recently. “Al‑Qaeda is making huge gains across multiple theaters,” she said. “Their current capability is far beyond what they were before 9/11.” Silence is a “deliberate strategy,” she said, to allow clandestine rebuilding. “They don’t want to make noise that would put eyes on them right now, because they’re not ready to make the comeback attacks they’re planning.” The Yemeni branch, which carried out the Pensacola shooting in 2019, has been tasked with leading operations against the West, and it has developed drone programs.

Moreover, Harmouch said, there are signs that the franchises’ loyalty oaths to al‑Qaeda core are still being honored. Since al‑Zawahiri’s death, in 2022, most signs have pointed to succession by another Egyptian, who goes by the nom de guerre Saif al-Adel, or “Sword of Justice.” A former military officer now in his 60s, Saif al-Adel seems to have paid attention, during his training, to strategy and tactics. He advised bin Laden not to attack the Twin Towers, on the correct theory that doing so would invite reprisals against the Taliban. He has survived being marked for death by the most powerful country in the world for 30 years—the past two decades as the guest of the Islamic Republic of Iran, under an enemy-of-my-enemy deal whose terms are not known. (As an extremist-Sunni group, al‑Qaeda is not a natural ally of extremist-Shiite Iran.)

According to Harmouch, the affiliates are heeding Saif al‑Adel’s commands. He told the Yemeni branch of al‑Qaeda to focus on maritime-attack capabilities. It did. He directed the groups to concentrate on achieving financial independence, and the Sahel branch began developing ransom-based revenue streams. Newly detected efforts to deploy drones and adopt 3-D-printing technologies also followed his statements urging the franchises to nerd out on the path of jihad. Harmouch allowed that the groups manage their own affairs, and that none has publicly renewed its loyalty oath to al‑Qaeda by acknowledging Saif al-Adel as its new emir. “But they are listening to him,” she said. “They are following what he’s been saying to a T.” If true, this claim is concerning, because Saif al-Adel’s recent directives include the advice to poison wells, contaminate food supplies with bacteria, conduct urban assassinations, and replace human suicide bombers with killer drones.

By now the rhythm of terrorism analysis should be familiar: For every piece of evidence that makes al‑Qaeda’s leaders look like evil geniuses, there is counterevidence that makes them look like hopeless bumblers. As with the war of attrition, Nelly Lahoud said, there is little evidence that bin Laden ultimately thought franchising out was a winning strategy, and a lot of evidence that he considered his far-flung allies pains in the terrorist ass. Bin Laden called them a “liability to jihad.” In his Abbottabad compound, he became a pioneer in remote work, realizing long before COVID how hard it is to manage an organization whose employees he never saw.

Almost immediately, the franchises proved unruly and, frankly, insane. Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Iraqi franchise, turned out to be a raving psychopath. Bin Laden fancied himself cerebral, deliberate, and discriminating in deciding who should die. Al-Zarqawi, by contrast, erred on the side of beheading, and positively reveled in gore. When al‑Qaeda leaders asked him to stop killing Shiite civilians because doing so was alienating potential supporters, al-Zarqawi ignored the request. The group ghosted al‑Qaeda in 2007 and never really listened to it again.

Other franchises adopted the al‑Qaeda brand before the group’s leadership could vet them. Their priorities often conflicted with bin Laden’s, and he and al-Zawahiri were reduced to an advisory role. Instead of building loyal, resilient versions of itself, al‑Qaeda created a management problem from hell. Even the more housebroken of the franchises, such as those in Yemen and North and West Africa, at various times told bin Laden, in the most deferential terms, to mind his own business. Chronically behind on the local agendas because of his isolation, he gave advice that was stale or ill-informed. He told the group in North and West Africa not to cut a ransom deal with France after the group seized hostages. He reminded the Yemenis that they ought to focus on attacking America, and not the Yemeni government or the Iranian-backed Houthis. In both cases, the affiliates assured their absentee leader that they knew best, and bin Laden was left to pout and write frustrated internal memos.

The most dramatic instance of insubordination was the Islamic State, the successor to al-Zarqawi’s branch of al‑Qaeda. The ISIS project eventually foundered after the whole civilized world decided to stop it by force. But before that happened, it overtook al‑Qaeda as the premier jihadist group. By comparison, al‑Qaeda looked cautious and stuffy. It had taken far less territory, shed less blood, and earned a reputation as the group of choice for radical Muslims who enjoy hiding in basements with elderly Egyptians. Al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006, but ISIS continued its spiritual founder’s passion project of dismembering infidels on camera, a practice al‑Qaeda considered counterproductive.

In her book, Lahoud quotes a 2011 letter from al-Zawahiri to bin Laden, incredulous at the Islamic State’s apparent policy of shocking and appalling even its own potential followers. “I do not understand,” al-Zawahiri wrote. “Are the Brothers not content with the number of their current enemies, being so eager to add new ones to their list?” In 2014, al-Qaeda disavowed ISIS after months of disputes between their leaders. Later, ISIS excommunicated al‑Qaeda after its leaders refused to pledge loyalty to the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Islamic State turned many Muslims off the idea of jihad altogether. Many had sympathized with bin Laden and been bitter toward America and Israel, and were intellectually but not viscerally opposed when those two countries were attacked. (I don’t condone terrorism, but …) The Islamic State convinced many otherwise undecided Muslims that the logical conclusion of jihadist terrorism was a death cult.

In some ways even more devastating to the al‑Qaeda model was the opposite transformation of al-Qaeda’s other regional leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. A veteran of the jihad against the Americans in Iraq and a close associate of al‑Baghdadi’s, al-Sharaa split with al‑Baghdadi in 2013, shortly before he declared his caliphate. The group al-Sharaa led, the Nusra Front, was not much better: It, too, tortured and killed and established a jihadist state, in this case loyal to al-Zawahiri. But over a period of about five years, al‑Sharaa and his followers lost their taste for jihad. In 2023, he told the journalist Wassim Nasr that they were no longer jihadists, and that the global jihadist movement had “only brought destruction and failure to their communities.” According to reports, he and his recovering jihadists helped the United States attack ISIS elements in the Middle East. Then, in December 2024, they sacked Damascus and took over the Syrian government. As president, al-Sharaa has since visited London and Washington. Donald Trump met him, pronounced him “a young, attractive guy,” and later gave him a bottle of cologne.

This example has been noticed. Nasr, a reporter for France 24 and a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, recently interviewed the leadership of al‑Qaeda’s current Sahel branch, JNIM. He told me that the group learned from al-Sharaa that it is “possible to get out of the jihadi sphere and be accepted by the international community—if global terrorism is denounced.” He said the group is thinking about trying to transform along similar lines. The main impediment to such a move is the Islamic State West Africa Province. Before he could moderate, al-Sharaa had to wait for ISIS to be crushed in Syria, so he would not face defections. JNIM is still fighting ISIS, and Nasr said it isn’t yet in a position to explore moderation.

“Al-Qaeda fathered a good son and a bad son,” Thomas Hegghammer, a scholar of jihadism at the University of Oxford, told me. “The bad son was ISIS and went on to do so much bad stuff that the whole family got a bad reputation. But then the good son played his cards so well that he reached state power.” Al‑Qaeda wanted the franchises to show how it endures. Instead they showed that its ideology leads to crucifixions and beheadings if followed, and power if renounced.

It’s hard to accept that your enemy is an idiot and that somehow you are losing to him anyway. Perhaps Saif al‑Adel, with ample free time in his safe house in Iran, has taken online executive-M.B.A. classes and learned how to motivate his employees and keep them on mission, as his predecessors surely did not. The other possibility is that Saif al‑Adel controls nothing and has been irrelevant for years. Neither possibility makes the United States look good. The first suggests that after 25 years of the War on Terror, terror is winning. The second suggests that these incompetent nobodies have persuaded the U.S. to burn through its military budget without improving its standing in the Middle East.

Both are possible, and it is difficult to tell the difference between an al-Qaeda that is stealthily rebuilding and an al-Qaeda that is dead. A cat that is stalking its prey is exactly as silent as a cat that was hit over the head two weeks ago with a shovel. Some of those who study and analyze jihadism sound exasperated by the task of convincing people that al‑Qaeda core is the second type of cat. Cole Bunzel, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, told me he considers the notion that al‑Qaeda is a “secret behemoth,” gathering strength under the guise of weakness, “mostly nonsense.”

“I see pretty much no evidence that al‑Qaeda has any competence or capability as a centralized organization,” Bunzel said. The various affiliates call themselves al-Qaeda, but they appear to take no meaningful guidance from anyone in al‑Qaeda core. He likened the core group to a “mostly defunct podcast,” a bunch of old guys who occasionally get together to put out a statement, but who have no power to do anything other than shout into a void, because global jihad has long since moved on.

“The branches that operate under al-Qaeda’s name have very little to do with the central leadership based in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan,” Bunzel said, adding that the fact that Saif al-Adel lives under Iranian supervision would make it awkward for anyone to take orders from him without having to wonder whether the orders were dictated by an Iranian intelligence officer. While other jihadists have spent the past 25 years declaring caliphates, sacking major cities, and sowing carnage and fear, Saif al-Adel has been writing essays and murmuring promises about something big in the works. Those essays, Bunzel said, are not exactly greeted with enthusiasm by jihadists, especially younger ones. The kids are lining up for other acts.

Daniel Byman, a veteran al-Qaeda watcher at Georgetown University, reminded me that al-Qaeda has not even officially announced that Saif al-Adel is in charge. “Their unwillingness to name a leader seems to me very damning,” he said. “If you’re a 20-year-old who wants to join, what are you going to think? Here’s a group that hasn’t done much, and I don’t even know who the leader is. That’s the group for me! ” As time passes and al-Qaeda delivers almost no punches against its prime enemy, “at some point the numbers just get pretty clear,” Byman said, and the most probable conclusion is that al-Qaeda core is “very, very weak.”

For decades, Thomas Hegghammer said, he has been puzzled by the speculation that a big al-Qaeda attack is just around the corner: “How long do we have to wait before we decide that prediction is wrong?” He acknowledged that an attack could happen at any time. But almost any terror group, including ones that nobody has ever heard of, can pull off a single attack. The question to ask, he said, is whether al-Qaeda can mount a sustained campaign of terror, as the Islamic State did in 2015. That question can be studied and assessed, and right now the answer appears to be no.

What’s most remarkable about al-Qaeda, Hegghammer said, is that it has persuaded so many of its enemies to bumble along with it. This band of incompetents has somehow managed to “live rent-free inside the head of the American national-security establishment for an extraordinary number of years.” It has dwelled in and dominated this collective imagination, and its persistent ability to remain in its enemies’ mind is more impressive than any substantive accomplishment. The threats posed by the group were real, he said, and it made sense to find and destroy it. But what Hegghammer called the “ghost story” of al-Qaeda—the incessant and intrusive thoughts about it, including frantic projection of power and genius onto an organization that by all evidence is in shambles—should have ended long ago.

In 2015, during the Islamic State’s heyday, I gave a talk about it before a private audience of policy makers and experts. I emphasized that the group wanted to build a state, and that unlike al-Qaeda, it would reduce its efforts to mount terrorist attacks in the United States if it thought those attacks would conflict with its state building. After the talk, a former senior official at the State Department came up to me and said he had no reason to doubt my analysis. But he said I should choose my words with great care, because anyone who predicts fewer attacks will be ridiculed when one occurs, and anyone who says the enemy’s capabilities have been degraded is going to be forever ignored when the enemy manages to lash out one last time. “You don’t want to be that guy,” he said: the one who tells everyone to chill out, the day before thousands of people are poisoned with Saif al-Adel’s ricin in their Cheerios.

But in the case of al-Qaeda, that guy has been right for the past 25 years.

* Lead illustration sources: U.S. Department of Defense / Getty; AFP / Getty; Getty; Brian Cleary / Allsport / Getty; MAI / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty; Joe Raedle / Getty.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Did al-Qaeda Succeed?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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