How America Contained Global Jihadism Without Winning the War on Terror

On a clear September morning in 2001, nineteen men boarded four commercial airplanes. Within hours, two towers in Manhattan had collapsed, the Pentagon was burning, and a field in Pennsylvania held the wreckage of a fourth plane. The death toll reached 2,977—the deadliest terrorist attack in history. Few Americans had heard of al-Qaeda before that day. By September 12, the country was at war.

Twenty-five years later, that war has not ended, but it has fundamentally changed shape. The United States did not defeat jihadism, but it did something perhaps more consequential: it contained it. The numbers tell part of the story. Since 2001, jihadi terrorists have killed 122 people on American soil—a fraction of what officials feared in the aftermath of 9/11. Al-Qaeda, which once commanded a global movement and inspired countless cells across continents, is devastated. The Islamic State, which at its peak in 2014 and 2015 controlled territory the size of Virginia and governed millions of people, lost every inch of ground it held. Yet jihadism itself has not vanished. It persists in Somalia, Mali, Yemen, and parts of West Africa, where weak governments and ongoing civil wars provide shelter for groups that still plot, still recruit, still kill.

The movement's origins lay in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Bin Laden and others built al-Qaeda into a transnational organization with a clear hierarchy, a safe haven under Taliban rule, and training camps that processed thousands of recruits. The CIA estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 volunteers attended those camps in the late 1990s. Some learned basic insurgent tactics. The most promising received instruction in counterintelligence and bomb-making. Many of the men who would hijack planes on 9/11 initially went to Afghanistan intending to fight in Chechnya before al-Qaeda redirected them toward the United States. The organization had the resources, the discipline, and the sanctuary to plan an operation of historic scale.

After 9/11, the United States moved with speed. Within weeks, CIA officers and special operations forces, working with anti-Taliban militias and supported by American airpower, toppled the Taliban government. Al-Qaeda's training camps were destroyed. Its leaders fled, most to Pakistan and Iran, neither of which proved as accommodating as Afghanistan had been. Pakistan's government, despite its own complications, regularly helped the United States arrest and kill al-Qaeda operatives. Without the large-scale training infrastructure it had built, al-Qaeda could no longer produce the kind of operatives capable of mounting attacks as sophisticated as 9/11.

But the war's trajectory was not linear. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, launched partly to confront terrorism, instead became a recruitment engine for jihadi groups. The occupation fueled anger across the region. The chaos of the 2011 Arab uprisings gave militant organizations room to expand. From that ferment emerged the Islamic State, which seized cities, declared a caliphate, and attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters. For a moment, the movement seemed ascendant again. Yet the Islamic State's territorial ambitions contained the seeds of its own defeat. Holding land made it easier to target. Governing exposed its brutality. Its maximalist ideology made it impossible to cooperate with other jihadis or with any state. As bin Laden himself had once warned, building a state gave enemies a place to concentrate their firepower.

The United States, meanwhile, had learned from its earlier mistakes. Rather than deploying tens of thousands of troops as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it used small special operations teams, armed drones, and intelligence cooperation with allies to erode the Islamic State's control. Local partners, trained and backed by American forces, did most of the fighting. The group lost territory steadily until it held nothing. The same pattern played out elsewhere: persistent American pressure, combined with local forces, kept jihadi havens off balance. Drone strikes, financial tracking, and intelligence sharing among allied services unraveled much of the global jihadi network.

Jihadism's decline, however, was not solely a product of American pressure. The movement inflicted wounds on itself. By declaring so many enemies—the United States, Israel, India, Russia, and various Muslim governments—jihadi groups diffused their energy and ensured that nearly everyone would fight back. More damaging still, they killed Muslim civilians. When al-Qaeda affiliates slaughtered Sunni and Shiite civilians in Iraq, when they murdered Saudi police officers, they lost the sympathy of populations that might have supported resistance to foreign powers. Clerics who had once endorsed global jihad withdrew their backing. In Saudi Arabia, the government, with broad public support, arrested and killed al-Qaeda members, crippling the organization's operations there.

By the mid-2020s, the movement faced a different kind of crisis: irrelevance. Recent upheavals in the Middle East—the war in Gaza, the fall of Assad to former jihadis, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran—supplied exactly the kind of grievances and narratives that once fueled global recruitment. Yet jihadi groups failed to capitalize. With the exception of Somalia and parts of West Africa, they mounted no mobilization comparable to the surge after the 2003 Iraq invasion or during the Islamic State's rise. The ideology persisted, but its salience had faded. Young Muslims in Europe and the Middle East were not flocking to join. The former jihadis who took power in Syria sought to make peace with the United States and Saudi Arabia, not wage war against them.

Yet the cost of this containment has been staggering. The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that nearly one million people died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen between 2001 and 2023—almost half of them civilians. The United States lost more than 6,000 soldiers and saw more than 50,000 wounded across Afghanistan and Iraq alone. The total expenditure reached $8 trillion through 2021. The wars did not end as hoped. The Taliban, removed from power in 2001, retook Afghanistan in 2021. Iraq, freed from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, became a breeding ground for the Islamic State. Counterterrorism efforts, despite their successes, did not stop jihadism entirely. Individuals inspired by jihadi ideology, even without direct contact with terrorist organizations, have attempted attacks. Many plots have been foiled through improved security measures, but the desire to kill Americans and others on jihadist target lists has not disappeared.

Today, the United States faces a different calculus. Most remaining jihadi groups operate in places peripheral to American interests—Somalia, Mali, Yemen—where weak governments and ongoing civil wars provide cover. There is a genuine risk that these groups could use such conflicts to rebuild safe havens from which to organize international attacks. Yet direct American intervention risks retaliation and entanglement in new conflicts. The current approach—drone strikes on leaders and operatives, limited military training for regional partners, intelligence cooperation with allies—keeps these groups contained but does not eliminate them. It is a strategy of management rather than victory, of vigilance rather than triumph. The United States must accept that jihadism may never truly vanish. What matters now is ensuring it does not rebuild into the kind of threat it once posed. That will require sustained effort, constant intelligence work, and the discipline to act behind the scenes rather than in ways that generate propaganda victories for the very groups America seeks to contain.