COVER STORY: THE WAR THAT WAS
The ‘War
On Terror’
Is Over
There could be more terrorist attacks,
but the “war on terror” as an organizing
principle of American foreign and
national-security policy is ending.
By James Kitfield
F
or a generation of Americans
seared by the horrific specta-
cle of 9/11, he was a shadowy
figure of malice, a disembod-
ied voice whispering messag-
es of doom that even a decade
of war failed to silence. In
more than 30 audio and video tapes released
since the deadliest terrorist attack in histo-
ry, Osama bin Laden taunted U.S. leaders for
their inability to bring him to justice even as
he seduced followers with his vision of a holy
war between Islam and the West that would
drive the infidels from Muslim lands.
Above all, bin Laden exhorted his “heroic
warriors” to kill Westerners and Jews as the
path to redemption. Often, the complex or-
ganism of global jihad responded to his en-
treaties with acts of wanton violence. For as
long as he was free, the very idea of bin Laden
18
remained potent and menacing. But then the
hard men with guns came in the night, and
he was just another terrorist at the end of his
bloody run of luck.
With bin Laden silenced, the overarching
question for Washington is, what becomes
of the movement he claimed to head? After
a leadership struggle, a much-degraded al-
Qaida will likely try to remain relevant in the
extremist pantheon by plotting reprisal at-
tacks, and the scattered franchises that the
organization spawned may well do the same.
But the truly existential danger was always
the power of bin Laden’s ideas in enticing le-
gions of followers to his twisted narrative of
holy war.
Certainly, the manner of bin Laden’s
death suggests that both sides in this twi-
light struggle understood their roles in what
are essentially competing narratives. Bin
Laden had sworn never to be taken alive in
his bid for “martyrdom,” and Navy SEAL
Team Six obliged, carrying its own message
that the United States never forgets. Then
bin Laden was given a respectful Muslim
burial at sea, ensuring that his final resting
place would not become a point of pilgrim-
age for true believers.
It’s possible, of course, that bin Laden’s
martyrdom narrative could reinvigorate
photo: get t y images /mario tama
interest in his ideas of a holy war with the
West, inspiring new waves of recruits to
join the “global jihad.” As terrorism expert
Peter Bergen points out in The Longest War:
The Enduring Conflict Between America and
Al-Qaida, something similar happened to
Sayyid Qutb, a writer and founding father of
the jihadist movement whose ideas caught
fire after the Egyptian government executed
him in 1966.
m ay 7, 2 011 nationa l jou r na l
 Cathartic: In New
York City, jubilation
marked the news of
bin Laden’s demise.

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COVER STORY: THE WAR THAT WAS

Initial reaction to the news of

bin Laden’s death, however, sug-
gests that his once red-hot torch
was already nearly extinguished.
In his ancestral home in the Middle
East, for instance, the response has
generally been a collective shrug.
Contrast that with the millions of
fellow Arabs who took to the streets
in recent months to shake off the
yoke of despotism and demand
democratic freedoms from auto-
crats throughout the Middle East,
or the reverence bestowed on the
lowly Tunisian fruit seller whose
self-immolation lit the fuse of those
peoples’ revolutions. Polls in re-
cent years have consistently driven
home the fact that Muslim support
for al-Qaida’s terrorist tactics and
bin Laden’s vision of a fundamen-
talist Islamic caliphate was declin- “Arab Spring”: Demonstrators
ing dramatically before his demise. in Tunisia (above) and Egypt (right).
“Osama bin Laden’s original
genius was to create a narrative of ebrations by revelers who heard the news of Since taking office, the Obama administra-
war between the West and Islam that was his death and flocked unbidden to the White tion has tried, with decidedly mixed success,
easy to understand and that resonated with House and Ground Zero, as the closest thing to end many of the policies most closely as-
aggrieved Muslims all over the world,” Ber- to a “Victory over Terrorism” day in the war sociated with that era, and to refocus U.S.
gen said. “And then along comes the ‘Arab on terrorism. foreign policy through a far broader prism.
Spring,’ which refutes his narrative that only Even if radical Islamist terrorism spikes Yet the difficulties and criticisms that Pres-
violence will topple the dictators, followed, in the short term as adherents seek revenge ident Obama has encountered in abolishing
with perfect timing, by bin Laden’s death. and remains a likely tactical threat for the “enhanced interrogations,” trying to close
You couldn’t select two better bookends for foreseeable future, bin Laden’s fevered the military prison at Guantanamo Bay,
the end of the ‘war on terror.’ ” dreams of leading a violent Islamist revolu- withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghani-
tion that sweeps fundamentalist theocracies stan, and reaching out to the Muslim world
END OF AN ERA into power almost certainly follows him to all speak to the grip that 9/11 and terrorism
In launching his “war on terror” after the 9/11 the depths. In that sense, the post-9/11 era continue to have on the U.S. body politic and

photos: (top to bot tom) get t y images /afp/fred dufour; get t y images /afp/ tim sloan
attacks, President George W. Bush famous- defined by the “war on terror,” when com- national consciousness.
ly warned the public that “there will be no bating terrorism was not only a national pre- Indeed, in the joyous faces of young cele-
surrender ceremony on the deck of a battle- occupation but was also elevated to the cen- brants hugging and singing “The Star-Span-
ship.” Years from now, however, Americans tral organizing principle of American foreign gled Banner” outside the White House on the
may look back on bin Laden’s quiet burial and national-security policy, is ending too. night of bin Laden’s death, it was easy to read
at sea from the deck of the aircraft carrier Of course, even Bush had moved beyond the emotional trauma carried by the genera-
Carl Vinson, along with the spontaneous cel- such rhetoric by the end of his second term. tion that came of age in the 9/11 era. In that
sense, bin Laden’s demise may prove helpful-
Fueling the fire: The war in Iraq, prosecuted by ly cathartic for a nation that remains trans-
Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, may have played fixed by the terrorist threat, despite the fact
into bin Laden’s hand. that al-Qaida has failed to launch a spectac-
ular attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, although
certainly not for lack of trying.
“I think the enormous reaction we saw to
bin Laden’s death does say more about us as
Americans than it does about the nature of
the Qaida movement or threat, because this
was just one man whose operational role in
terrorism had diminished greatly over time
and whose radical Islamist ideology had lost
much of its energy,” said Paul Pillar, former-
ly a senior Middle East and counterterror-
ism analyst at the CIA and now a professor
in Georgetown University’s security studies
program. “And I hope his death gives our po-
litical leaders a chance to declare a victory of
sorts and help move the nation beyond this

20 m ay 7, 2 011 nationa l jou r na l


obsession with the so-called war on terror.
For too long, the way Americans think about
the challenges we confront around the world
and at home has been distorted by the one-
dimensional focus on security and terrorism
that grew out of the 9/11 attacks.”
Fawaz Gerges is the author of the forth-
coming book The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda.
“In their reaction to bin Laden’s death, you
could see that the Muslim and Arab worlds
have already moved beyond the slogans and
methods of al-Qaida,” he told National Jour-
nal. “The Arab Spring protests have dealt a
crippling and almost certainly fatal blow to
bin Laden’s ideology by revealing the huge
imbalance and divide between the extrem-
ism of a small fringe group and the universal
aspirations of millions of Arabs.
“The irony is that while the Muslim world
has moved beyond al-Qaida and the 9/11 nar-
rative, the reaction to bin Laden’s death in
the United States strongly suggests that it
still has a strong hold on the American imag-
ination,” said Gerges, a professor of Middle
Eastern politics and international relations
at the London School of Economics and Po-
litical Science. “You can’t look at the scenes
following the announcement of his death
photo: get t y images /afp/pedro ugarte
without understanding that bin Laden and
al-Qaida not only damaged America physi-
cally but also psychologically. So, I hope
President Obama and other political lead-
ers in Washington use bin Laden’s death as a
way to bring closure and reduce this gap be-
tween the actual threat of terrorism and its
outsized hold on the American imagination,
so that we can move on as a nation.”
White House officials also see an opportu-
nity in the fact that bin Laden’s demise comes
just as the Arab Spring is offering an alterna-
nationa l jou r na l m ay 7, 2 011
tive model for empowerment of the Arab and
Muslim worlds. As the most visible symbol
of al-Qaida, they say, bin Laden in death has
shown the American public that he was just
one man at the head of a discredited orga-
nization, and that there is a future beyond a
perpetual, open-ended war on terrorism.
“That’s why it was only after bin Lad-
en was killed that it sunk in how essential it
was for this to happen for us to accomplish
our broader goals,” Ben Rhodes, deputy na-
tional-security adviser for strategic commu-
nications, told National Journal. “His death
doesn’t finish this chapter altogether, but af-
ter seeing him brought to justice, Americans
can now envision the ultimate defeat of al-
Qaida. And that needed to happen for Ameri-
ca to move on to the next chapter.”
ATTACKING THE “FAR ENEMY”
If bin Laden’s death marks the logical con-
clusion of the war on terrorism as both an era
and a unifying worldview in Washington, it’s
important to remember the truly existential
threat that the terrorism master represented
at the height of his powers. From the outset,
bin Laden masterfully wove a plausible nar-
rative targeting Washington as the super-
power behind the thrones of the kings and
despots of Arabia. Only attacks on this “far
enemy,” he argued, would force the United
States to retreat and cause royal and military
dictators of the Middle East to fall, restor-
ing the Islamist caliphate to its former glory
with dominion over all Muslim lands.
To realize his vision of a war between Is-
lam and the West, bin Laden adopted a big-
tent strategy that united disparate and often
bickering extremist groups under the Qaida
banner, in the process becoming adept at
bridging differences between them.
With his soft voice and professo-
rial style, bin Laden also proved
an effective propagandist, recruit-
ing thousands to his global jihad
and training an estimated 20,000
would-be terrorists in camps in Af-
ghanistan.
As the Qaida organization grew
and the ambition and destructive-
ness of its terrorist attacks escalated
dramatically throughout the 1990s,
so too did the legend of bin Laden. A
scion of Saudi wealth, he had joined
the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in
the 1980s. After helping to fell the
Soviet goliath, bin Laden devoted
himself to the deprivations of life
as a warrior prince. He remained
convinced that the United States
would likewise retreat from the
Middle East and ultimately crumble
if bloodied enough. The September
11, 2001, attacks put his proposition
to the test.
Steve Coll is the author of Ghost Wars: The
Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin
Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September
10, 2001. “Osama bin Laden was a distinct-
ly charismatic communicator, and his gentle
style made him a more plausible leader than
the argumentative style of [Qaida deputy Ay-
man] al-Zawahiri,” Coll said. “He also gained
a lot of credibility by presiding over the larg-
est terrorist attack in history and surviving
to tell about it and to continue communicat-
ing his message for so long. And while his
thinking and worldview were slightly mud-
dled, bin Laden had a vision for what he was
trying to accomplish and a matching narra-
tive for how the news of the day fit into that
story. His wasn’t a political theory you’ll be
reading a decade from now, but it had a co-
herent narrative.”
Bin Laden achieved maximum popularity
after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, an op-
eration that played into his depiction of the
United States as a nation that coveted Mus-
lim lands and oil. In 2004, a Pew Research
Center poll reported that the Qaida leader
had a 65 percent favorability rating in Paki-
stan, for instance. As late as 2008, a survey
of opinion in the Muslim world found that in
countries as disparate as Indonesia, Jordan,
Morocco, and Turkey, bin Laden inspired
more “confidence” than President Bush—
and by significant margins.
“After the invasion of Iraq, bin Laden came
to be seen as the most viable symbol of anti-
Americanism, because he was the one Mus-
lim who had dared to stick a finger in the eye
of the much-loathed superpower,” said An-
drew Kohut, president of the Pew Research
Center in Washington. Then, as Qaida-in-
21
COVER STORY: THE WAR THAT WAS
Wrong: Bin Laden misjudged both
his adversary and his people.
spired terrorism spread across the Muslim
world, with bombings of nightclubs in Indo-
nesia, wedding parties in Jordan, embassies
in Turkey, and mosques in Iraq, support for
bin Laden specifically and terrorism general-
ly started to decline dramatically, Kohut said.
“By the time of his death, polls showed that
the majority of Muslims no longer viewed
him as the Islamic warrior standing up to the
loathed superpower,” he said. “Bin Laden was
already widely discredited.”
FATAL ERRORS
In retrospect, bin Laden made two fun-
damental, strategic miscalculations. The
events of recent days and months exposed
both, with fatal results not only for the arch-
terrorist but also for his cause.
First, he badly misjudged his adversary.
His experiences as a mujahedeen fighting the
Soviets in Afghanistan convinced bin Laden
22
that a relative handful of holy warriors could
topple a superpower and that the United
States was ripe for a fall. Studying the with-
drawal of U.S. forces from Beirut in 1983 (af-
ter a suicide bombing killed 241 U.S. service
members) and from Mogadishu, Somalia, in
1991 (after 19 U.S. soldiers died in a firefight),
he concluded that the United States was a
“paper tiger.”
Based on such anecdotal evidence, the
cloistered bin Laden launched his war against
the United States. He failed to understand
that Beirut and Mogadishu represented a
peacekeeping and a humanitarian mission,
respectively, with limited national interests at
stake. Nor did he anticipate the national rage
that an attack on the homeland of the mag-
nitude of 9/11 would provoke, or that the U.S.
response would be to invade Afghanistan,
topple his benefactors, the Taliban, and send
al-Qaida scurrying across the mountains.
He likewise misjudged the effectiveness of
the armed drone strikes that across 10 years
and two U.S. administrations continued to
reach into supposed sanctuaries in Pakistan
and methodically shrink bin Laden’s circle of
friends and trusted lieutenants. SEAL Team
Six delivered the final lesson about America’s
long memory and will to fight.
“Bin Laden pushed this story that al-
Qaida could strike the ‘paper tiger’ of America
with impunity. And the fact that 10 years later
we got him destroys that narrative and sends
the very useful message to terrorists that
you can run and hide, but you can’t wait the
United States out,” said Michael Swetnam,
chairman of the Potomac Institute for Policy
Studies and a coeditor of Usama bin Laden’s al-
Qaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network. “I think
his death will help turn al-Qaida back into
the fringe terrorist group it was in the 1980s,
before it became a popular movement.”
Perhaps even more inexcusable than
misjudging his enemy, bin Laden ultimate-
ly failed to understand his own people. He
correctly read the underlying sense of hu-
miliation and seething anger at the stilted
existence in many autocratic Muslim societ-
ies, and he tried to tap into it with a vision
of nihilistic violence and a return to a 7th-
century Islamic fundamentalism. When the
Arab Spring erupted, al-Qaida was all but
struck mute by a spectacle suggesting that
the masses really wanted freedom.
“The challenge the United States con-
fronted in dealing with al-Qaida initially was
that its narrative had greater appeal to po-
tential Muslim recruits than the U.S. narra-
tive,” said Martin Indyk, a Middle East ex-
pert and the director of foreign policy at the
Brookings Institution in Washington. “Bin
Laden’s narrative was that only violence and
terror would topple Arab autocrats and re-
deem Muslim dignity and rights. That nar-
rative has been dealt a serious blow by those
responsible for the Arab Spring, because
they have toppled regimes and redeemed
Arab dignity but in a way that is exactly op-
posite of what bin Laden preached. That fact,
coupled with the killing of bin Laden by U.S.
forces, has created a crisis of both leadership
and narrative for al-Qaida.”
photo: get t y images /afp/ausaf newspaper
The marginalization of al-Qaida will not
bring an end to the terrorist threat or free the
United States from the need for constant vig-
ilance. A major terrorist attack on U.S. soil or
the successful hijacking of a people’s revolu-
tion that brings Islamist extremists to power
in an Arab state could well shift the narrative
again. But the revolutionary vanguard that
Osama bin Laden envisioned leading, with
its inexhaustible legions of recruits bent on
endless jihad against the West—that fevered
dream has been extinguished. The “war on
terror” is over. n
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