Bin Laden and al-Qaida brand of jihadism, post-9/11

In a post yesterday, I quoted Michael Moore saying, "In the end, Bin Laden won."

And I agreed with him, in the sense that Bin Laden had a plan that was evil and surely mad. As I described it, his plan was to pull off a spectacular terrorist attack to which the US would react with domestic repression and foolish military actions against Muslim countries that would generate more of the kind of jihadism he was promoting.

Nelly Lahoud takes a different perspective in Bin Laden's Catastrophic Success: Al Qaeda Changed the World--but Not in the Way It Expected (Foreign Affairs 100:5, Sept-Oct 2021) She is reporting on her research into documents seized by the US during the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Bin Laden was killed.

The Abbottabad papers include handwritten notes that bin Laden composed in 2002, disclosing "the birth of the idea of 11 September." They reveal that it was in late October 2000, within weeks of the USS Cole attack, that bin Laden decided to attack the American homeland. They also reveal his reasoning at the time: bin Laden believed that "the entire Muslim world is subjected to the reign of blasphemous regimes and to American hegemony." The 9/11 attack was intended to "break the fear of this false god and destroy the myth of American invincibility."

About two weeks after the attack, bin Laden released a short statement in the form of an ultimatum addressed to the United States. "I have only a few words for America and its people," he declared. "I swear by God almighty, who raised the heavens without effort, that neither America nor anyone who lives there will enjoy safety until safety becomes a reality for us living in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad." The attack had an electrifying effect, and in the years that immediately followed, thousands of young Muslims around the world committed themselves in various ways to bin Laden's cause. But a close reading of bin Laden's correspondence reveals that the world's most notorious terrorist was ignorant of the limits of his own metier.

She writes that "although bin Laden's correspondence indicates that he was well versed in Islamic history, particularly the seventh-century military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, he had only a perfunctory understanding of modern international relations."

That was reflected in the 9/11 attack itself, which represented a severe miscalculation: bin Laden never anticipated that the United States would go to war in response to the assault. Indeed, he predicted that in the wake of the attack, the American people would take to the streets, replicating the protests against the Vietnam War and calling on their government to withdraw from Muslim-majority countries. Instead, Americans rallied behind U.S. President George W. Bush and his "war on terror." In October 2001, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan to hunt down al Qaeda and dislodge the Taliban regime, which had hosted the terrorist group since 1996, bin Laden had no plan to secure his organization's survival. [my emphasis]

Lahoud's article indicates that she is citing a 2002 document on that point. So it's not entirely clear from this account if Bin Laden was pleasantly surprised that the US reaction was more than disruptive domestic protest, or if he was dismayed at a previous miscalculation.

But Bin Laden presumably did not hope for his own organization to be devastated. And, in fact, though there are still terrorist groups that indicate some kind of allegiance to Al Qaida's ideas, as Lahoud recounts, Bin Laden's Al Qaida of 2001 was quickly devasted and disbursed. As she puts it, "the al Qaeda organization was broken, its brand lived on."

Their communications reveal that for the rest of bin Laden's life, the al Qaeda organization never recovered the ability to launch attacks abroad. (The group did carry out attacks in November 2002 in Kenya but was able to do so only because the operatives tasked with planning them had been dispatched to East Africa in late 2000 and early 2001, before everything fell apart for al Qaeda in Afghanistan.) By 2014, bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, found himself more preoccupied with delegitimizing the Islamic State (or ISIS), the jihadi group that eventually overtook al Qaeda, than with rallying Muslims against American hegemony. Still, it is impossible to look back at the past two decades and not be struck by the degree to which a small band of extremists led by a charismatic outlaw managed to influence global politics. Bin Laden did change the world--just not in the ways that he wanted. [my emphasis]

Lahoud also argues, "The Obama administration, for its part, overestimated the positive effects that bin Laden's death and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would have on the fight against jihadism."

She concludes on a mixed note about the current lagacy of Bin Laden's brand of jihadism:

... Washington and its allies have come to realize (or at least they should have) that an open-ended war on terrorism is futile and that a successful counterterrorism policy must address the legitimate political grievances that al Qaeda claims to champion--for example, U.S. support for dictatorships in the Middle East.

Washington cannot quite claim victory against al Qaeda and its ilk, which retain the ability to inspire deadly, if small-scale, attacks. The past two decades, however, have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish. They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of bringing the United States to its knees. [my emphasis]