Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, it is clear that Osama bin Laden's wider strategic plans failed, despite the initial shock and devastation. The al-Qaida leader envisaged an economically battered United States withdrawing from the Middle East and a global Muslim uprising, but neither came to pass.
Bin Laden's expectations and the US response
On 11 September 2001, Bin Laden drove with a small number of retainers 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 him to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers and the Pentagon, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.
Within days, President George W Bush framed the US response as a global “war on terror”, a choice that proved clumsy, inappropriate, and counterproductive. This unprecedented series of campaigns led to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, involved torture, renditions, and alliances with dubious regimes, cost huge amounts of money, destabilised swathes of the Middle East, and brought suffering to millions.
Was this what Bin Laden had hoped to achieve? It is often suggested that his aim was to draw the US into wars that would weaken its economy and lead to its collapse, much like the Soviet Union was drained by the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. However, there is little evidence to back this theory. Bin Laden rejected as unrealistic his aides' warnings that the attack would bring US troops to Afghanistan, expecting little more than another barrage of ineffective missiles. He had no plan when US troops did come; within months, shaken al-Qaida members described “misfortune [and] disaster”.
Economic and military objectives unmet
Bin Laden's actual strategy was to weaken the US economically and 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”, claiming every dollar spent had cost Washington a million dollars in economic fallout and military spending. This was wildly optimistic. The most costly event to the US would have been another successful major attack, which never came—an unarguable success of US policymaking and a major failure for al-Qaida. Despite economic problems, the US has not suffered a fate similar to the USSR, nor has it withdrawn its forces from the Middle East.
A second objective was to force the US to end support for regional rulers Bin Laden hated, starting with the al-Saud family. Some targets have been felled since 2001, but not by his actions. Muammar Gaddafi was deposed 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.
Propaganda and the global uprising that never came
Bin Laden's third aim was propaganda. His theatre of terror was designed to radicalise followers, mobilise new ones, and divide communities. He emphasised that attacks like 9/11 were “just reactions to what's happening against our children in Palestine, in Iraq, in Somalia, in southern Sudan, in Kashmir”, calling for a global Muslim uprising. While the attacks focused attention on these conflicts, they brought no significant improvement for victims. Support for Bin Laden peaked a few years after 2001 and then ebbed. Shortly before his death by US Navy Seals in Pakistan, he was contemplating rebranding al-Qaida, its name tarnished by criticism that it killed large numbers of Muslims. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, gave up on the uprising, pivoting to a local-first strategy.
In 2014, the Islamic State capitalised on chaos in Iraq and Syria to establish its caliphate, but even this was over by 2019. Since then, such extremism has been confined largely to the periphery of the Islamic world, with al-Qaida and IS expanding most effectively in sub-Saharan Africa, exploiting anarchy, failed states, and demographic pressures. Some analysts suggest the total membership of groups in Somalia or Mali with loose links to al-Qaida 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, in aims or capabilities.
Legacy and the end of charismatic leadership
Appalling attacks inspired by Bin Laden's ideology still occur, partly due to polarisation from his violence and the reaction to it. However, neither al-Qaida nor IS have prominent charismatic leaders. One reason is that such figures are swiftly killed by the vastly more capable US, but also because the era when such individuals could command a significant following is over. That al-Qaida still exists is an achievement of sorts for the group and its founder, but it should not be described as any victory.
