Notes on Graeme Wood's "Did al-Qaida Succeed?"

A skeptical article that nevertheless leaves many assumptions unchallenged.

The journalist Graeme Wood, who has written extensively - albeit controversially and often problematically - about global jihadism and other subjects,¹ has a long essay on al-Qaida in The Atlantic. The piece reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 and, refreshingly, inclines towards the perspective that al-Qaida, especially al-Qaida central, is grossly overrated by many “terrorism experts.” The piece also has some deep flaws, both glaring and subtle, that are worth discussing - especially the way it preserves the structure and authority of “terrorism expertise” even as it challenges that sector’s conclusions. The assumption running through the piece is that our understanding of al-Qaida should be mediated through what terrorism experts (or at least some of them) say and, relatedly, through the propaganda of top jihadist leaders. The result is a myopic view of both al-Qaida specifically and jihadism more broadly.

Al-Qaida Is Overrated

Wood wisely resists the trap of arguing that al-Qaida is poised for a comeback. Here is one key passage, quoting the eminent scholar Thomas Hegghammer:

What’s most remarkable about al-Qaeda, Hegghammer said, is that it has persuaded so many of its enemies to bumble along with it. This band of incompetents has somehow managed to “live rent-free inside the head of the American national-security establishment for an extraordinary number of years.” It has dwelled in and dominated this collective imagination, and its persistent ability to remain in its enemies’ mind is more impressive than any substantive accomplishment. The threats posed by the group were real, he said, and it made sense to find and destroy it. But what Hegghammer called the “ghost story” of al-Qaeda—the incessant and intrusive thoughts about it, including frantic projection of power and genius onto an organization that by all evidence is in shambles—should have ended long ago.

There has been, in fact, a rhythm to much “terrorism analysis” ever since the al-Qaida/Islamic State split in 2013-2014; whenever one of those two groups is ascendant, numerous analysts will rush to proclaim that the other is ready for a comeback. That conversation also plays out, fractal-like, at the regional level. In the Lake Chad Basin, one can expect that if ISWAP is riding high, articles will pop up arguing that “Ansaru” or “JAS” shouldn’t be counted out. In the Sahel, if JNIM is thriving, analysts will remind everyone not to forget about ISSP. And on a long enough timeline, the analyst can always argue either that they’ve been proven right, or that they haven’t been proven wrong yet - if anyone even remembers to check the predictions of yesteryear.

Wood astutely makes that exact kind of conversation a point of discussion in his article, and even closes with it:

In 2015, during the Islamic State’s heyday, I gave a talk about it before a private audience of policy makers and experts. I emphasized that the group wanted to build a state, and that unlike al-Qaeda, it would reduce its efforts to mount terrorist attacks in the United States if it thought those attacks would conflict with its state building. After the talk, a former senior official at the State Department came up to me and said he had no reason to doubt my analysis. But he said I should choose my words with great care, because anyone who predicts fewer attacks will be ridiculed when one occurs, and anyone who says the enemy’s capabilities have been degraded is going to be forever ignored when the enemy manages to lash out one last time. “You don’t want to be that guy,” he said: the one who tells everyone to chill out, the day before thousands of people are poisoned with Saif al-Adel’s ricin in their Cheerios.

But in the case of al-Qaeda, that guy has been right for the past 25 years.

This is a fairly provocative position for a writer at The Atlantic to take. Wood effectively sides with analysts such as Hegghammer, Cole Bunzel, and Dan Byman against Bruce Hoffman, who is widely considered the doyen of terrorism studies in the United States. Wood quotes and paraphrases Hoffman at length, giving space to Hoffman’s argument that, in Wood’s rendering, “the group is the shrewdest and most effective terrorist organization of all time—and that it is more dangerous than ever.” The reasons adduced for that point of view are: (1) al-Qaida survived substantial counterterrorism campaigns, (2) the group’s plots bled the United States of lives and money, and (3) al-Qaida’s “franchises” - we’ll come back to this - control and threaten substantial territory. The first half of the article examines those claims before the second half turns to more skeptical perspectives.

The second of those arguments is the most interesting to me. Here, too, the article is fairly sophisticated, challenging the idea that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were masterminds.

Yet Wood swings too far, in my view, in the opposite direction, painting Bin Laden as a kind of bumbling idiot. (Try for a moment to imagine yourself as Bin Laden circa 2001 - how well do you think you could have done at trying to topple the existing regimes of the Arab world and seeking to force the United States to exit the region?) And I think the narrative of “we allowed this idiot and our own grief to draw us on a fool’s errand” is more palatable to The Atlantic’s intended audience than would be “al-Qaida was and is overrated, but the United States also seized upon 9/11 as a justification for an ambitious if hubristic imperialist project.”

One of the most problematic parts of the article, in fact, is the utter dismissal of the idea that the United States might have invaded Afghanistan even without 9/11:

Bin Laden seemed to have realized that he’d created a debacle for himself and his allies. At one point, he argued that the Taliban was doomed anyway, and that he was therefore blameless for provoking an invasion of the group’s country and the destruction of its regime. “We knew for certain that Afghanistan was already a target, and that America was determined to bring down the Taliban,” he wrote in a document quoted by [Dr. Nelly] Lahoud. He and his non-Afghan terrorist crew could hardly be faulted for an American invasion that was already inevitable. “Everything that happened was going to happen even if we did not strike,” he wrote. This ludicrous claim, that George W. Bush wanted to occupy Afghanistan and merely advanced his calendar because of 9/11, is self-serving, Lahoud writes, and “reeks of repressed Arab guilt.”

(Before moving on, by the way, what is “Arab guilt”? This is the kind of language that The Atlantic revels in, of course - this is the same magazine that published the infamous “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” after all.)

There is a convincing argument to be made, and Wood makes it, that Bin Laden both overestimated the impact that 9/11 would have domestically and underestimated how much American counterterrorism would damage his own organization. But I think there is much more to explore about how U.S. policy in the Middle East would have proceeded without 9/11. Tellingly, even as both Wood and Lahoud reject the idea that the Bush administration would have invaded Afghanistan anyways, Wood does not pose the question of whether the Bush team would have invaded Iraq regardless - a scenario that cannot be so easily laughed off. I also think the “US invades Afghanistan even without 9/11” counterfactual is not so ridiculous, given how much rhetorical and political groundwork had been laid for justifying an intervention even before 9/11.

With all that said, let’s turn to the question of franchises, beginning by quoting Wood:

Like a malevolent Ray Kroc, bin Laden and later al-Zawahiri began licensing the al‑Qaeda brand to hitherto independent jihadist organizations far from Afghanistan. In 2004, after overtures from jihadists in Iraq, bin Laden started the process of taking on franchises; it had become clear that the frontier of jihad would be the killing of American soldiers there. Al‑Qaeda received loyalty oaths from the franchises’ leaders and tried to vet them. Bruce Hoffman called this proliferation a “survival strategy” and said it had worked as intended, as a solution to the unrelenting heat that the United States was putting on the core group. Hoffman said bin Laden accepted, reluctantly, that he no longer had a base in Afghanistan, and he established bases elsewhere to hedge against extinction. Those affiliate organizations—in Iraq, North and West Africa (joined in 2007), Yemen (2009), East Africa (2012), and the Indian subcontinent (2014)—have at times misfired, but the successes have paid off handsomely.

Wood’s glib reference to the MacDonald’s popularizer is meant to be funny, but like other would-be jokes and gibes littered throughout the article, it actually calls our attention to the hollowness of some of the standard vocabularies used in the terrorism analysis industry for discussing al-Qaida, jihadism, etc. The idea of al-Qaida “franchises” is so widespread - I have used it plenty myself, and have been influenced by Barak Mendelsohn’s carefully researched The Al Qaeda Franchise - that one sometimes forgets it is a metaphor.

Bin Laden was not much like Ray Kroc at all; the organizations that al-Qaida seeded and recruited did not display the kind of uniformity and predictability that has made MacDonald’s so ubiquitous - rather, these different regional organizations have all emerged out of different histories and environments that stamped them each in fundamental ways.

In any case, Wood shows convincingly how the “franchises” question can be argued to either make al-Qaida seem vast and unstoppable or messy and flailing. He takes the latter position. Juxtaposing ISIS and Ahmad al-Sharaa, he writes, “Al‑Qaeda wanted the franchises to show how it endures. Instead they showed that its ideology leads to crucifixions and beheadings if followed, and power if renounced.” Neither al-Qaida core nor the “franchises,” then, meet the criteria for a successful instantiation of Bin Laden’s goals. I would add that how formidable the “franchises” appear ultimately depends on the moments you choose to highlight, the metrics you foreground, and what you think they are aiming for.

Wood’s jokes, meanwhile, lead me to another point I want to make about the article: it both reflects and advances what we might call the “desacralization” of 9/11 in American life.

A Muted 25th Anniversary

Imagine that Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016, served one embattled term, and then lost to a figure such as Marco Rubio or Tom Cotton in 2020, either of whom might be serving a second term by now. I don’t want to make Donald Trump into some behemoth of history, shaping events and culture around him, but I do think he’s had a significant cultural impact - and has emboldened and amplified various cultural forces in turn. One part of that impact has been “desacralizing” the American presidency and some of the key events that undergirded narratives of twenty-first-century American righteousness and power. Those narratives, I think, were transferred relatively smoothly from Bush to Barack Obama, broke down with Trump 1, were not very much “restored” by Joe Biden, and are now breaking down further under Trump 2.

In the alternative scenario of a Clinton-Cotton world, I am not sure it would be so easy for Wood to talk about al-Qaida’s “streak of incompetence,” to call one would-be al-Qaida operative a “slovenly thug” and another a “complete moron,” to dub Bin Laden a “chatterbox” who “whined for years about a lack of money and fighters,” etc. A great nation needs a great enemy, after all, and it is a mark of slipping confidence in American greatness that Bin Laden can now be depicted in an elite magazine as a clown.

Trump wants to be seen as the defeater, the crusher of ISIS, of course, but he emphasizes pugnaciousness, contempt, and boasting - Trump has not invested in the kind of persona or the kind of iconography and ritual that would sustain an aura of sacrality around 9/11. If the bombastic and fleeting 250th commemoration of America’s founding is any guide, the administration will not lean hard into remembering 9/11 with gravitas on its 25th anniversary.

Wood’s article holds up a mirror to this moment of national ambivalence in the same way that Bush’s speeches, especially following 9/11 through the Mission Accomplished stunt, reflected the (awful) ethos of that period. The contrast is stark.

Continuities in Analysis

Yet many things remain the same. My final note is to flesh out a point I made in the first paragraph of this piece, namely that Wood leaves intact the long-standing structures of terrorism analysis.

It is not obvious to me at all that the best way to report a piece on al-Qaida twenty-five years after 9/11 is to consult full-time terrorism experts. There are distinctions to be made among the people Wood cites, of course: some of the people Wood quotes are scholars with deep research interests that extend well beyond terrorism, and it is not surprising that those scholars are the skeptics, while the researchers and consultants who focus more narrowly on terrorism are the more bullish on al-Qaida.

But the anchoring assumption of the article is that the most valuable perspectives on al-Qaida come from people who study its propaganda and its internal documents and who study its leaders. The article seems to say that there are legitimate debates to be had about al-Qaida, but the people qualified to participate are the ones who have taken a top-down view of the organization, who consider the words, deeds, and motives of Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, Ahmad al-Sharaa, etc.

This approach is part of why Wood got so much heat for his “What ISIS Really Wants” article in 2015 - not just the latent Islamophobia of the piece, but also the idea that the key to understanding ISIS lay not in the politics of Iraq and Syria, not in Mosul or Raqqa, but in an office on Princeton University’s campus, where Wood came at last to interview Professor Bernard Haykel, of whom Wood wrote, “when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.” Haykel’s work is profound, especially his book on the scholar al-Shawkani. But the assumption that all this “stuff” happening “over there” can be explained by someone “here” with a “Mephistophelian goatee” is a big part of the problem.

If the “franchises” are so important to the question of assessing al-Qaida’s success, moreover, why not include a larger crowd of voices in the discussion and the debate? What about journalists and analysts who live in Mogadishu, or Bamako, or al-Mukalla? Wood quotes an Afghan security contractor whom he met in 2010, but otherwise all the quotations come from voices who are - to anyone who has read in the literature on global jihadism - very familiar experts. With the resources of The Atlantic at one’s back, it should not be hard to get some firsthand sources, and/or some perspectives of people who live proximate to the “franchises.” The article ultimately entrenches the sense that what matters is the elite, intra-expert conversation in the West - that al-Qaida is best analyzed from a distance, both geographically and in terms of leaving the motivations of ordinary Somali, Malian, Burkinabè, Yemeni, and other fighters unexamined.

To me, then, the article is complex and flawed: Wood’s refreshing challenges to the idea of a ten-foot-tall al-Qaida are made possible by the intense political disenchantment of this moment, while the article’s assumptions show that much of the post-9/11 discourse remains unquestioned. Substantially deeper assessments of al-Qaida can and should still be written.

1. Wood received tremendous criticism, appropriately in my view, for his 2015 article “What ISIS Really Wants.” Even fiercer criticism came in 2024 for his discussions of Israeli state violence in Gaza - see here for some coverage.