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Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success Al Qaeda Changed the World—but Not in the Way It Expected “On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda carried out the deadliest foreign terrorist attack the United States had ever experienced. To Osama bin Laden and the other men who planned it, however, the assault was no mere act of terrorism,” Nelly Lahoud writes in a new essay. “To them, it represented something far grander: the opening salvo of a campaign of revolutionary violence that would usher in a new historical era.”
Lahoud offers fresh insight into the geopolitical ambitions and the miscalculations of Washington’s chief antagonist in the “war on terror,” having spent the past three years analyzing tens of thousands of files that were recovered from bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after U.S. special operations forces killed him in a 2011 raid. “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,” she writes. “Bin Laden did change the world—just not in the ways that he wanted.”
Read more from Foreign Affairs on the United States’ fight against terrorism:
“America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success” by Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon “U.S. Foreign Policy Never Recovered From the War on Terror” by Matthew Duss “The Death and Life of Terrorist Networks” by Christopher Blair, Erica Chenoweth, Michael C. Horowitz, Evan Perkoski, and Philip B. K. Potter Subscribe to Foreign Affairs© 2021 Council on Foreign Relations | 58 East 68 Street, New York NY | 10065 Reset your password here. |
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