9/11: 25 Years On | The Reckoning | 3

So bin Laden's death in 2011 creates a problem for the story because it feels like an ending, but yet it wasn't one.

Al-Qaeda may have lost its founder and also its sanctuary in Afghanistan and much of the leadership that had organized 9/11, but the war had produced a sequence of events that had carried on for more than a decade.

The movement built by bin Laden was already changing shape.

And the central Al-Qaeda organization in Pakistan was coming under enormous pressure from American intelligence, drone strikes, special forces incursions.

And while Pakistan was under so much pressure and scrutiny, the idea, the name, the Al-Qaeda brand and ideology was traveling elsewhere.

Al-Qaeda affiliates emerged in Yemen, North Africa, Somalia, and eventually the West African Sahel.

The organization became less like a single HQ issuing instructions and more like a franchise, locally rooted movements fighting local wars, but connected globally by this ideology, personnel, expertise, and allegiance, which is important, Peter, because while you can target and weaken an organization, it is much harder to target and weaken an idea.

Because it's death by a thousand cuts.

So if the objective after 9/11 was to destroy the organization capable of sending 19 men to attack New York and Washington, then the United States, I guess, was remarkably successful.

It tracked them all down, got rid of, uh, its leadership group, but Al-Qaeda never re- achieved anything re- remotely similar again.

But if the aim was in fact broader and it was to extinguish the political and religious movement from which 9/11 emerged, then it's much harder to mark that homework generously.

So bin Laden's death in 2011 creates a problem for the story because it feels like an ending, but yet it wasn't one.

Al-Qaeda may have lost its founder and also its sanctuary in Afghanistan and much of the leadership that had organized 9/11, but the war had produced a sequence of events that had carried on for more than a decade.

The movement built by bin Laden was already changing shape.

And the central Al-Qaeda organization in Pakistan was coming under enormous pressure from American intelligence, drone strikes, special forces incursions.

And while Pakistan was under so much pressure and scrutiny, the idea, the name, the Al-Qaeda brand and ideology was traveling elsewhere.

Al-Qaeda affiliates emerged in Yemen, North Africa, Somalia, and eventually the West African Sahel.

The organization became less like a single HQ issuing instructions and more like a franchise, locally rooted movements fighting local wars, but connected globally by this ideology, personnel, expertise, and allegiance, which is important, Peter, because while you can target and weaken an organization, it is much harder to target and weaken an idea.

Because it's death by a thousand cuts.

So if the objective after 9/11 was to destroy the organization capable of sending 19 men to attack New York and Washington, then the United States, I guess, was remarkably successful.

It tracked them all down, got rid of, uh, its leadership group, but Al-Qaeda never re- achieved anything re- remotely similar again.

But if the aim was in fact broader and it was to extinguish the political and religious movement from which 9/11 emerged, then it's much harder to mark that homework generously.