Tony Karon -- Why Osama bin Laden Failed

By John Ballard

About Tony Karon

I�m a journalist from Cape Town, South Africa, resident in New York since 1993. I�m currently a senior editor at TIME.com .... I�ve worked there since 1997, covering the Middle East, the �war on terror� and international issues ranging from China�s emergence to the Balkans. I also do occasional op-eds for Haaretz and other publications, as well as bits of TV and radio punditry for CNN, MSNBC, and various NPR shows.

He points out that the WTC attack had the opposite effect on most of the world's Muslim population from what Bin Laden intended.

Eight Years After 9/11: Why Osama bin Laden Failed

The 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington � like those that preceded them in East Africa in 1998 and those that followed in London, Madrid, Bali and other places � were tactical successes in that they managed to kill hundreds of innocent people, grab the world's headlines and briefly dominate the nightmares of Western policymakers. But the strategy those attacks were a part of has proved to be fundamentally flawed. Terrorism departs from the rules of war by deliberately targeting the innocent, but it shares the basic motivational force of conventional warfare � "the pursuit of politics by other means," as Clausewitz wrote.

The purpose of the 9/11 attacks was not simply to kill Americans. Rather, the attacks formed part of bin Laden's strategy to launch a global Islamist revolution aimed at ending U.S. influence in Muslim countries, overthrowing regimes there allied with Washington and putting al-Qaeda at the head of a global Islamist insurgency whose objective was to restore the caliphate that had once ruled territory stretching from Moorish Spain through much of Asia.

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The flaw in bin Laden's strategy of trying to capture the imagination of the Muslim masses through spectacular acts of terrorism was obvious even in the immediate wake of 9/11. In much of the Arab and Muslim world, there was a pervasive refusal to believe that Muslims had been responsible for the attacks, even after bin Laden claimed responsibility. The denial inherent in the tendency common from Egypt to Indonesia to blame Mossad or the CIA for 9/11 reveals a damning negation of al-Qaeda's tactics. So repulsive was the mass murder of innocents to ordinary Muslims that most refused to celebrate the attacks, as bin Laden had hoped they might, but instead sought to blame them on those deemed enemies of Islam.

Even in countries where al-Qaeda had hoped to capitalize on resentment against American influence, its networks were largely rolled up by security services as the population looked on indifferently. By invading Iraq, the Bush Administration probably did a far more effective job than bin Laden of weakening U.S. influence in the Muslim world and rallying its youth to resistance. Yet even in Iraq, al-Qaeda's efforts to gain control of the resistance failed because its ideology and tactics were so loathsome to even the bulk of the Sunni insurgents fighting the Americans that they eventually made common cause with the U.S. against the jihadists.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, bin Laden's erstwhile stomping ground, the fight against the U.S. is being waged by the Taliban, which may once have been an ally of al-Qaeda but now exists entirely independently of bin Laden's movement and will ultimately make its strategic decisions based on its national interests. The sobering reality for bin Laden is that even among those dedicated to resisting the U.S. and its allies, his ideology of global jihad against the "far enemy" (the U.S.) has failed to supplant the more pragmatic Islamist movements such as Hamas, Hizballah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, all of whom limit themselves to clearly defined national objectives, eliciting increasingly manic denunciations from al-Qaeda's cave dwellers.

Muslim extremism will only be defeated by other Muslims. Others can fight, complain, plot, and cajole, but in the end the only people who will defeat the twisted aims of Muslim extremists will be brothers and sisters in the faith.

Want an illustration? How long would the current split in American politics last in the wake of another 9/11? Like quarreling siblings, any outside threat would unite the bitterest political opponents within hours.