Al-Qaeda Has Ended, U.S. Officials Should Say So

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda is gone. The organization that murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001—in the towers, at the Pentagon, in a field in Pennsylvania—no longer exists as a functioning entity. Yet U.S. officials continue to speak and act as though it does, lending the corpse a ghost of legitimacy it no longer deserves. Terrorism persists. Jihadism has not vanished. But the specific group that changed the course of American foreign policy a quarter-century ago has ended, and the country should say so plainly.

The toll of the response to that attack has been staggering. More than 15,000 American military members and contractors died in the wars that followed. Roughly 1.8 million more were disabled. From 2012 to 2021, four times as many active-duty or veteran service members took their own lives as died in combat. Soldiers from allied nations—Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom—fought and died alongside Americans. These men and women, and the families who lost them, deserve to know that their sacrifice accomplished something real. The United States and its allies lost the war in Afghanistan. But they defeated al-Qaeda.

The evidence lies in the pattern of attacks. Before 9/11, bin Laden's core organization maintained a steady drumbeat of operations against American targets: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six and injured more than 1,000; Khobar Towers in 1996, which took 19 lives; the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224; the USS Cole attack in 2000 that killed 17. After 2001, the organization attempted to strike the American homeland twice—a botched shoe-bomb plot in 2001 and a failed subway bombing scheme in 2009. Then, after 2009, core al-Qaeda's global operations essentially stopped. The group inflicted more damage on American allies than on America itself, with attacks in Bali, Riyadh, and London. But the momentum had shifted. By September 2011, U.S. officials estimated that only a couple of dozen people directly connected to the 9/11 attacks remained alive.

The organization's collapse was not primarily the result of military decapitation, though that mattered. The May 2011 raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killed the founder and yielded documents showing he had lost operational control of the group years earlier. His death was justice, but it did not end al-Qaeda. What truly crippled the organization was strategic failure—much of it self-inflicted. Bin Laden himself understood the danger. In a letter discovered during the Abbottabad raid, written in May 2010, he warned a deputy that the group was losing Muslim support by killing Muslim civilians. "This is when we lose the perception of the Muslims towards us," he wrote, "which is that we are the ones defending the Muslims." The numbers bore out his fear. Between 2003 and 2011, support for bin Laden in Indonesia fell from 59 percent to 26 percent. In Jordan, it dropped from 56 percent to 13 percent. In the Palestinian territories, from 72 percent to 34 percent. In Pakistan, where he was hiding, from 46 percent to 18 percent. A decade after 9/11, his vision of a vanguard uniting the Muslim world had evaporated.

Internal fractures accelerated the decline. The most dramatic was the split with ISIS, which had begun as an al-Qaeda affiliate before rebranding itself. In 2005, bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, urging him to stop executing hostages on video and killing Shiite civilians. "We don't need this," Zawahiri wrote. The leader ignored him. When a U.S. airstrike killed that commander in 2006, the damage was already done. Over the next decade, global jihadism flowed toward ISIS's approach—brutal, territorial, uncompromising—and away from al-Qaeda's more cautious strategy. By 2014, ISIS had conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria and drawn some 15,000 foreign fighters from 80 countries. Al-Qaeda had ideas. ISIS had land. The younger, flashier brand won recruits that al-Qaeda could not replace.

ISIS's territorial ambitions ultimately vindicated Zawahiri's warnings. By concentrating forces in one place, the group became vulnerable to conventional military assault. By embracing grotesque violence, it alienated nearly everyone outside its ranks. A global coalition, working with Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian forces, recaptured the territory by 2019 and destroyed the caliphate. But al-Qaeda had already lost. It surrendered its foothold in Iraq and watched its recruitment base splinter.

Intelligence and law-enforcement cooperation among allies proved more decisive than drone strikes alone. New methods of tracking terrorist financing, biometric databases, and intelligence-sharing networks allowed the United States and its partners to monitor threats across borders. In 2006, U.S. and British intelligence services thwarted an al-Qaeda plot to smuggle explosives in beverage containers aboard transatlantic flights. These unglamorous tools, applied consistently, degraded the organization's capacity to operate.

Today, the nominal leader of al-Qaeda is Said al-Adel, who lives in Iran under conditions of severe restriction. He has not even publicly claimed the title, perhaps fearing assassination—or perhaps because there is nothing left to lead. The organization that attacked America 25 years ago has ended. Jihadist terrorism persists in regional franchises across the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the Sahel, and South Asia. These groups operate under names that invoke al-Qaeda, but they are not centrally directed by bin Laden's organization and should not be called its affiliates. Calling them so inflates the threat they pose without clarifying it. U.S. officials should stop using the term. The war on al-Qaeda is over. The war on terrorism, by contrast, continues—but that is a different fight, and one that demands clarity about what the enemy actually is.