The moon rises over lower Manhattan as the "Tribute in Lights" illuminates the sky on the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 11, 2008

He may have eluded justice and the long reach of the world's most powerful military force; his followers may (and probably will) strike again at some point in the future, near or distant; but history's verdict on Osama bin Laden has been in for some time now: al-Qaeda 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. (See pictures of the challenge of memorializing 9/11.)

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.  Continue reading