Al-Qaeda Is Over, and US Officials Should Finally Say So

Audrey Kurth Cronin, the terrorism scholar whose 2009 book How Terrorism Ends shaped how a generation of policymakers think about jihadist groups, argues in Foreign Affairs that the organization Osama bin Laden built is no longer a going concern, and that Washington's own rhetoric is the last thing keeping it alive. She traces core al-Qaeda's unraveling through a familiar sequence: bin Laden's killing in 2011, a botched succession under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the loss of Afghan sanctuary, and a slow bleed of money, recruits and strategic direction that left no functioning command structure behind. Her sharper point is definitional: the groups still fighting under an al-Qaeda-linked banner in the Sahel, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa and South Asia are dangerous in their own right, but they answer to no one in Waziristan or anywhere else, and calling them “al-Qaeda affiliates” flatters them with a coherence they do not have. Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, she writes, American officials keep invoking a centrally directed al-Qaeda less because the intelligence supports it than because admitting the organization is gone would mean admitting that an era of policy — detention, drone strikes, permanent war authorizations — has run out of its justifying enemy. That, she argues, is exactly why the overdue admission matters: conflating today's fragmented, regionally rooted jihadist groups with bin Laden's al-Qaeda inflates the threat, misdirects resources toward a phantom hierarchy, and obscures the very different, more local fights the United States is actually being asked to referee. The essay lands two days before the anniversary that made “al-Qaeda” a permanent fixture of American vocabulary.