25 years after 9/11, bin Laden's caliphate may have failed, but he triggered wars that have since weakened US power in the Middle East, writes Hesham Gaafar.
By Hesham Gaafar
A quarter-century tends to sharpen questions that once sounded indecent to ask out loud. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of 11 September 2001, one of them refuses to go away: did Osama bin Laden win?
The instinctive answer is no. Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaeda's core was hunted into irrelevance years before a US Navy SEAL team found him hiding, isolated and largely powerless, in a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. No caliphate rose from the ashes of the Arab autocracies he despised. When the region's people finally did rise, in 2011, they carried no black banners and quoted no jihadist scripture. They wanted bread, dignity and a vote - not a war with Rome.
And yet, a quarter-century out, with US troops gone from Kabul in humiliation and the region's old American-built order in open collapse, the honest answer is more uncomfortable than the instinctive one. It requires separating two projects that have been carelessly conflated for 25 years: bin Laden's theological ambition, and his strategic method. The first failed absolutely. The second worked - not as he designed it, but as an act of asymmetric provocation succeeds: by luring a far stronger adversary into destroying itself.
A Miscalculation
Nothing has done more to correct the record on bin Laden's own thinking than Nelly Lahoud's forensic reading of the roughly 6,000 Arabic-language documents recovered from his compound. Her account of the archive demolishes a myth popular on both the jihadist and the neoconservative side: that bin Laden foresaw, and welcomed, a long American entanglement in Muslim lands. He didn't. His calculation was almost the opposite, and considerably cruder.
Bin Laden had watched Washington abandon Beirut after the 1983 barracks bombing, and flee Mogadishu after the 1993 firefight. He concluded, wrongly, that the American public had no stomach for casualties, and that one spectacular strike would do to Washington what a decade of Vietnam had done: force a humiliated retreat from the Muslim world. Strip away the US security umbrella, he reasoned, and the "apostate" Arab regimes propped up by it would collapse on their own, clearing the way for al-Qaeda to lead the masses into a restored caliphate.
It was, in the language of his own circle, a plan to strike the head of the snake rather than its tail. It was also a catastrophic misreading of American politics. Rather than withdraw, Washington rallied behind an open-ended global war. Al-Qaeda's core, by its own internal correspondence, spent the following decade not building a movement but simply surviving - hunted by drones, its own security committee called a calamity, cut off from the regional franchises that hijacked its brand for sectarian wars it privately regarded as disastrous for its image.
The organisation was reduced to watching the Arab Spring unfold on satellite television with a mixture of excitement and dread.
Bin Laden's own daughter, according to the documents, worried openly that a new generation might conclude that political change was possible without jihad. She was right. It was.
Judged on its own terms, bin Laden's project was a rout. He did not mobilise the Ummah. His own franchises did not obey him. He died in hiding, isolated even from the organisation that bore his name. This part of the story is genuinely worth putting to rest.
The Trap Sprung Anyway
But grand strategy is not measured only by whether the plan worked as drafted. It is measured by what an adversary's reaction costs. And on that score, the story Andrew Bacevich tells in America's War for the Greater Middle East is not one of jihadist failure. It is one of imperial self-harm.
Convinced of its own indispensability, Washington treated 9/11 as a licence to remake the Islamic world by force, launching an open-ended "war on terror" that eventually touched some 85 countries. By the accounting of Brown University's Costs of War project, the bill has run past $6 trillion - closer to $8 trillion counting veterans' care - and has cost close to a million lives, including thousands of American service members.
The invasion of Iraq did not produce a client democracy. It produced a sectarian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State group, and a decisive strategic gift to Iran. Two decades spent chasing a stateless enemy through the mountains of the Hindu Kush were two decades China spent consolidating power in Asia largely undisturbed.
None of that was written into bin Laden's plan. He did not predict a multipolar 2026 any more than he predicted his own decade in hiding. But he understood something his adversary did not: a wounded superpower certain of its own righteousness can be goaded into wounding itself far more badly than any non-state actor ever could.
This is usually where the anniversary essay stops, with irony and a shrug. It shouldn't. Because the structure 9/11 set in motion did not just cost blood and treasure - it broke the political architecture that made American primacy in the Middle East possible in the first place.
Marc Lynch has called this structure the "American Middle East": the post-1991 order built on Washington's protection of Israel, its access to Gulf oil, and its sponsorship of a network of compliant, heavily militarised Arab autocracies. As Lynch argues in Foreign Affairs, that order is now finished - and the recent war with Iran was only its final casualty, not its first.
Steven Cook's diagnosis in The End of Ambition supplies the mechanism. Throughout the Cold War, he argues, Washington succeeded precisely because its Middle East goals were modest and preventive: keep oil flowing, keep the Soviets out, keep Israel secure. Only after 1991, drunk on unipolar confidence, did the foreign policy establishment swap prevention for transformation - and transformation, in the Middle East, is where American power keeps going to die.
The invasion of Iraq was, in Cook's own reading, Washington's Suez moment: the self-inflicted blow that broke the back of its regional order, much as the 1956 Suez crisis broke Britain's and France's.
The bookends of that unravelling arrived a generation apart: the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, and the Saudi-Iran normalisation two years later, brokered not in Washington but in Beijing, with the United States pointedly absent. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Cairo no longer behave as client states. They hedge, openly, between Washington, Beijing and Moscow, having concluded, correctly, that American protection is no longer unconditional and American attention no longer reliable.
Add to this the moral cost. Unconditional US backing for Israel's campaign in Gaza finished off whatever remained of Washington's claim to defend a rules-based order, in full view of a generation across the Global South that will not forget what it watched happen, with American fingerprints on it.
On the ledger of political theology, bin Laden's account is bankrupt. No caliphate. No mobilised Ummah. A movement that outlived him mainly as a brand hijacked by local warlords for massacres he privately deplored. The region's people rejected his vision the moment they had a real choice, in favour of something more modest and more human: a job, a vote, an end to the torture chamber.
On the ledger of systemic consequence, the verdict runs the opposite way. Bin Laden did not need to build anything. He needed only to provoke a superpower certain of its own virtue into a two-decade campaign of overreach that would drain its treasury, fracture its domestic politics, distract it from its real strategic competitors, and ultimately dissolve the very regional order his 19 hijackers set out to attack. He got exactly that - more than he could have imagined from a cave in Tora Bora.
None of this vindicates him. But a quarter-century on, as Washington confronts a Middle East it can no longer arrange, referee or rebuild, the uncomfortable truth is that the man who lost the argument over what the region should become nonetheless helped determine, more than any other single actor, who no longer gets to decide.