Al-Qaida after 9/11: The War on Terror and the Decade of Demise
By Anne Likuski
I.B. Tauris
ISBN: 978-0-7556-4856-6
240pp.
Al Qaeda’s decline is commonly attributed to the United States-led, so-called “War on Terror”, with the prevailing narrative emphasising a sustained campaign of drone strikes, intelligence operations and high-value targeted killings that ultimately eliminated the group’s top leadership, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
In Al-Qaida after 9/11: The War on Terror and the Decade of Demise, however, Dr Anne Likuski, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), offers a far more nuanced, unsettling perspective.
Shifting the focus from Washington’s counterterrorism apparatus to Al Qaeda itself, Likuski argues that the organisation’s decline resulted not only from sustained military pressure but also from internal organisational decay, strategic confusion, weakened cohesion and deteriorating leadership, which increasingly undermined its ability to survive and operate effectively.
Likuski, who also authored the highly acclaimed Al-Qaida in Afghanistan in 2017, is uniquely positioned to dismantle the myths surrounding the terror group’s operational capacity. The greatest strength of her new book lies in its methodology.
A recent book by a Norwegian scholar offers not only a compelling analysis of the fraying of the global terrorist organisation but of how militant movements evolve under sustained pressure
Much of the literature on Al Qaeda examines bin Laden’s ideology or evaluates the effectiveness of the US counterterrorism campaign. Likuski instead reconstructs the organisation from within, relying on the correspondence of middle-ranking leaders, based largely in Pakistan, who managed Al Qaeda’s day-to-day affairs while bin Laden remained increasingly isolated. These leaders were responsible for administering the organisation during periods when communication with its leader was sporadic, delayed or absent.
Her principal source is the Abbottabad documents — thousands of Arabic-language communications recovered during the 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound and declassified by the CIA in 2017. These papers offer an unprecedented window into an organisation beset by leadership dysfunction, poor communication and strategic uncertainty. Rather than revealing an efficient clandestine network, they depict an organisation whose leaders frequently improvised in the absence of coherent direction.
Likuski assesses Al Qaeda’s performance across three principal theatres: Afghanistan, Iraq and international terrorism.
Although Al Qaeda reportedly devoted much of its budget to the Afghan conflict, its direct military contribution remained limited. When the anti-US insurgency intensified in 2002, both the Taliban and Al Qaeda were disorganised. The group began rebuilding its network in 2004, when the Egyptian militant Khalid Habib was appointed to lead the “Arab Frontline” in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Pakistan’s military increased pressure on Arab militants in Waziristan, particularly after assassination attempts against then-president Gen Pervez Musharraf, forcing Al Qaeda to view Iraq as a more promising battlefield.
Popular narratives often portray the Taliban and Al Qaeda as inseparable ideological allies. However, the Abbottabad archives reveal a more pragmatic and often strained relationship. The Taliban’s objectives remained primarily nationalist, focused on restoring the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan rather than advancing Al Qaeda’s transnational jihadist agenda. They treated the Al Qaeda operatives as guests and were reluctant to embrace the organisation’s global ambitions.
By the mid-2010s, as the Taliban intensified their military campaign and political preparations to regain power, they imposed tighter restrictions on Al Qaeda’s activities, prompting the group to shift greater attention to other theatres, particularly Yemen.
The correspondence also reveals growing mistrust within Al Qaeda, whose leaders increasingly viewed the Taliban, including its supremo Mullah Omar, as influenced by Pakistan’s military. Bin Laden ultimately envisioned relocating Al Qaeda’s senior leadership beyond the reach of what he considered the Taliban’s “hypocritical” influence.
The dysfunction in Iraq was even more pronounced. Although its Iraqi affiliate became a powerful insurgent force between 2004 and 2007, the parent organisation exercised little control over it. Bin Laden opposed the unilateral declaration of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq in 2007, and communication between the two leaderships had collapsed by 2010. This disconnect foreshadowed the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an independent, fierce rival.
The Abbottabad letters also reveal that, in the mid-2000s, bin Laden considered renaming Al Qaeda, as part of what the group’s correspondence described as a “new phase of corrections and development” after reviewing the group’s past mistakes. He argued that “Al Qaeda” sounded too much like a military base and suggested other names, including Jama’at I’adat al-Khilafa al-Rashida [The Group to Restore the Rightly Guided Caliphate].
When the US accelerated its drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal areas after 2008, the pressure became unbearable. Though Al Qaeda initially underestimated the threat, by late 2010, its leadership concluded that remaining in the Waziristan region had become untenable, forcing a strategic withdrawal that further disrupted its command structure.
If the book has one limitation, it is its reliance on archival sources, which inevitably confines its analysis to the decade following 9/11. Readers seeking a detailed assessment of Al Qaeda’s contemporary footprint following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021 will find only limited direct discussion. This, however, reflects not a shortcoming of Likuski’s scholarship but an inherent limitation of the available source material.
Though the book’s timeline ends before the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, its insights are remarkably prophetic. The 2022 killing of Al Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri in a CIA drone strike in central Kabul proved that the group’s historical ties to the Taliban elite endure, even as the regional security landscape entered a new phase.
From my perspective as a journalist and researcher covering Al Qaeda and its allied groups in the region, one of the most significant developments has been the profound diffusion of Al Qaeda’s identity. Instead of operating a visible, independent infrastructure, regional branches — such as Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) — now function almost entirely as embedded components within local networks such as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).
This adaptive model enables Al Qaeda to preserve its ideological influence, protect its leadership and assets, and sustain operational relevance, while allowing the Taliban administration in Kabul a degree of plausible deniability in relation to its commitments under the Doha Accord with the United States.
While Al Qaeda and AQIS have historically favoured a gradualist approach built on local alliances, particularly in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre, the so-called Islamic State’s regional affiliate, ISKP, has embraced spectacular, hyper-sectarian violence, to project itself as the sole vanguard of transnational jihad.
Ultimately, the book is far more than a history of a single terrorist organisation. It is a compelling analysis of how militant movements evolve under sustained pressure — fragmenting organisationally, adapting strategically and embedding themselves within local conflicts to ensure their long-term survival.
At a time when the future trajectory of jihadist violence remains deeply uncertain, the book provides an essential framework for understanding not only Al Qaeda’s past but also the changing nature of terror groups in South Asia and beyond.
The reviewer is a journalist and researcher. He can be reached at
zeea.rehman@gmail.com and
@zalmayzia on X
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 19th, 2026