How Al Qaeda Fell: Terrorists Sometimes Defeat Themselves

Al Qaeda is over. The organization founded and led by Osama bin Laden, which attacked the United States 25 years ago and killed 2.977 innocent Americans at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania, no longer exists - and American officials should say so openly, instead of further fueling its myth by acting and speaking as if it still exists.

Terrorism is not gone, jihadism is not gone, and the US-Israeli war against Iran could further fuel anti-American sentiment and violence. However, the group that attacked the United States on September 11th no longer exists.

In the years following the attacks, thousands of Americans dedicated their lives to avenging the victims. The horror that gripped the nation as people watched planes hit the towers—innocent people crushed, burned, or leaping to their deaths—evoked a powerful and passionate response. Those who participated in the direct response paid a high price: in the post-9/11 wars, more than 15.000 U.S. military and military contractors died in combat, and an estimated 1,8 million were left disabled.

From 2012 to 2021, four times as many active-duty military members and veterans died by suicide than in combat. Members of the armed forces of America’s loyal allies, particularly Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, joined the United States in combat; hundreds died fighting alongside Americans. They and their families deserve to know that their efforts were not in vain. Washington and its allies lost the war in Afghanistan, but they succeeded in the fight against al-Qaeda.

Jihadist terrorism continues to pose a threat, and not all groups using the name “Al Qaeda” have 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 control territories, and some have come close to overthrowing governments, particularly in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen.

Jihadists of various stripes are training in Afghanistan under the Taliban — a development that must be closely watched. But none of the groups sometimes called “al-Qaeda offshoots” are centrally directed or led by bin Laden’s organization, and officials should stop suggesting otherwise, as this exaggerates the threat these groups pose rather than making it easier to fight them. In fact, it would be best to stop using the term “al-Qaeda offshoot” altogether.

An analysis of the patterns of attacks directly linked to al-Qaeda shows how its core has lost momentum over time. Before 9/11, al-Qaeda's core maintained a steady pace of operations around the world against American targets. These included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and injured more than 1.000 people; the 1996 attack on the World Trade Center complex, which killed 19 and wounded hundreds; the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 and injured thousands; and the 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer USS Cole, which killed 17.

After 2001, attempts by core al-Qaeda to attack US territory included a failed 2001 attempt to detonate a shoe bomb on a Miami-bound plane, as well as a failed 2009 plot to carry out a suicide attack on the New York City subway.

The group, however, inflicted more casualties on American friends and allies than on the United States itself, carrying out deadly attacks in Bali in 2002, Riyadh in 2003, and London in 2005. But after that wave of attacks in the first decade of the 21st century, other jihadist groups took over, and after 2009, core al-Qaeda's global operations virtually ceased.

For decades, I have been studying the ways in which terrorist groups cease to exist, drawing on a database of 457 terrorist campaigns and organizations over the past hundred years. By analyzing their composition, goals, and audiences, it is possible to identify common patterns of development.

Although not mutually exclusive, there are six main paths by which such groups eventually disappear or change form: elimination of leadership, negotiation, success, failure, repression, and diversion to another mode of action, such as ordinary crime or insurgency.

In the case of core al-Qaeda, the elimination of leadership and military pressure played an important role, but the group ultimately met its end through strategic failure - just as bin Laden feared it would.

Moving target

After the September 11 attacks, the American campaign was supposed to be aimed at destroying their perpetrators. However, the United States did not clearly define the threat. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which Congress passed on September 14, 2001, did not mention al-Qaeda at all, but rather described Washington’s enemies vaguely as “those states, organizations, or persons that [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or facilitated the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

A few days later, President George W. Bush reiterated that approach. “Our war against al Qaeda begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he said. “It will not end until every terrorist group with a global reach is found, stopped, and defeated.”

In doing so, the United States effectively declared war on a tactic—terrorism—that had shaped political violence in the modern world since the waves of anarchist terrorism in Europe before World War I. Washington had set itself a task it could not accomplish. Defining “terrorism” as an enemy meant that the American campaign would have no clearly defined boundaries and could go on indefinitely.

This was followed by an ill-directed campaign in Afghanistan, which removed the Taliban from power in Kabul but allowed bin Laden and his associates to escape, and then the war in Iraq, where al-Qaeda had not previously operated. Its branch only emerged after a year of US military occupation.

The invasion of Iraq did more to prolong the life of al-Qaeda than any other single event. It attracted new recruits from Sunni populations around the world and ultimately created the conditions for the emergence of the Islamic State.

Yet over the next 25 years, sometimes almost in spite of themselves, the United States and its allies managed to defeat bin Laden's al Qaeda - often with the unintended help of the organization itself.

A key moment was the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which further disrupted al-Qaeda's internal cohesion. US forces stormed the compound where bin Laden was staying, killed him, then helicoptered his body to an aircraft carrier and buried him at sea, preventing the creation of a burial site that could have served as a memorial or gathering place for his supporters.

The documents recovered during that operation were almost as valuable to the American fight against terrorism as bin Laden's death itself. They provided compelling evidence that he had not been directing the group's operations from a single center for some time. His death did not mark the end of al-Qaeda, but it did mean that justice had been served and weakened the ability of his supporters to rally around him.

By September 2011, US officials claimed that no more than a few dozen people directly linked to the September 11 attacks remained alive. But rather than declare victory over the group at that point and move on, the US expanded the drone strike campaign, which began in 2002 under President Bush and accelerated during the early years of Barack Obama's administration.

Instead of so-called targeted attacks, in which known leaders were targeted, the campaign increasingly relied on “pattern-based attacks,” targeting unidentified individuals or groups whose behavior and characteristics fit a specific profile. Such attacks were carried out not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in Somalia and Yemen.

The drone campaign thinned al-Qaeda's ranks and enabled retaliation for attempted attacks. For example, members of the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda who trained and equipped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be "underwear bomber" who tried to bring down a passenger plane in 2009, were killed.

But drone strikes have also fueled terrorism. According to declassified FBI conversations, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, who was also inspired by the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda, told a friend that the death of an eight-year-old child in that attack was justified because children in Afghanistan and Pakistan had been killed in US drone strikes.

The drone campaign also had strategic consequences for US relations with its allies: public opinion in France, Germany, Spain, Turkey and Britain became increasingly negative towards the US “global war on terror.” The drones were tactically important and probably saved lives, but they did not bring about the end of al-Qaeda.

Much more important to the success of the fight against the organization was the cooperation of intelligence services and law enforcement agencies among American allies, which remains the foundation of the American fight against terrorism today. New measures to combat terrorist financing, biometric checks and databases, as well as new ways of sharing intelligence among allies, allowed Washington to better monitor threats outside American territory.

Thus, in 2006, close cooperation between American and British intelligence services thwarted an Al Qaeda-linked plot to smuggle TATP explosives in beverage containers and use them to bring down passenger planes flying across the Atlantic to the United States.

Disintegration from within

However, much of the damage al-Qaeda suffered was self-inflicted. One of the key reasons was the backlash it received from terrorist attacks that killed Muslim civilians, as well as the resulting loss of support among the communities it claimed to represent.

Bin Laden was aware of this weakness, and his frustration is evident in communications found in the Abbottabad compound. In a May 2010 letter to one of his deputies, he warned: “Then we lose the image that Muslims have of us - that we are the ones defending Muslims and fighting their greatest enemy, the Crusader-Zionist alliance... (and instead) we kill those whom the general public considers to be Muslims.”

Al-Qaeda began building a network of branches around the world in 2004, but these were mostly formed from existing organizations, and their operational links to the central core of al-Qaeda were often unclear. By bin Laden's own assessment, the rogue branches were doing more harm than good to al-Qaeda, as most of their victims were Muslim civilians, whose families and communities then blamed al-Qaeda for the violence.

According to a Pew Global Attitudes survey, support for bin Laden himself fell from 59 percent to 26 percent in Indonesia between 2003 and 2011, from 56 percent to 13 percent in Jordan, and from 72 percent to 34 percent in the Palestinian territories. In Pakistan, where bin Laden was hiding, his support fell from 46 percent in 2003 to 18 percent in 2010.

Ten years after September 11, Bin Laden's dream of a vanguard that would unite Muslims has virtually disappeared.

Internal divisions also contributed to al-Qaeda's decline. The most dramatic split was with the Islamic State, or ISIS, which initially operated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda before breaking away and reshaping itself.

ISIS conquered large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and attracted some 15.000 foreign fighters from 80 countries to its self-proclaimed caliphate. This posed a huge challenge to the parent organization: Al Qaeda had the ideology, but ISIS had the territory.

ISIS’s trajectory revealed a fundamental problem with its affiliates that did not share, or even necessarily understand, bin Laden’s strategy. In 2005, bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of what was then called al-Qaeda in Iraq and would later become ISIS, advising him to stop killing Shiite civilians and beheading hostages in gruesome videos.

“Among the things that the Muslim population that loves and supports you will never be able to accept (...) are scenes of slaughtering hostages,” Zawahiri wrote. “We do not need that.”

Zarqawi did not listen to him. He was killed in a US airstrike in 2006, but over the next decade, global jihadism took a strong turn in the direction he advocated, away from the relatively more cautious approach of al-Qaeda.

However, as ISIS pushed back against al-Qaeda, the limitations of its strategy became increasingly apparent, confirming Zawahiri's warnings. ISIS's first mistake was to concentrate a large number of fighters and military equipment in a limited space, making it an ideal target for conventional military forces.

The second mistake was his willingness to openly embrace extremely brutal and sadistic methods, which turned virtually everyone outside the organization against him. By 2016, almost the entire world was united against ISIS.

Working with Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian forces, the global coalition to defeat ISIS by 2019 had reclaimed the territories the group had captured and destroyed its caliphate.

For Al Qaeda, however, the damage had already been done: it lost its foothold in Iraq and had to share its recruiting base with a younger and more attractive jihadist organization.

Zawahiri's response was decentralization and greater reliance on groups in South Asia and North Africa, such as Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which were primarily focused on overthrowing local governments.

In July 2022, almost a year after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Zawahiri was killed in a US drone strike in Kabul. The subdued reaction to his death further confirmed the weakness of al-Qaeda's central core.

Today, its alleged leader is considered to be Said al-Adel, who lives in Iran, a country with a Shiite majority, where he, along with other al-Qaeda leaders and their families, spent years under a form of house arrest in the decade after September 11th and where his space for action remains severely limited.

He hasn't even declared himself the leader of the group, perhaps because he fears he might be killed - but perhaps also because, in reality, he has nothing left to lead.

Although the group could one day reshape itself or carry out attacks sponsored or aided by Iran, the al-Qaeda that attacked the United States 25 years ago no longer exists.

The United States sometimes accelerated and sometimes slowed its decline. But, in the end, al-Qaeda failed.

The text is taken from Foreign Affairs.

The author is the director of the Institute for Strategy and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University.

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