"Al Qaeda's Business Is Terrorism."
Only in part. The al Qaeda brand is associated with mass deaths of innocent civilians for obvious reasons. The 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 Americans; the organization's earlier efforts, targeting U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000, killed dozens more Americans and more than 200 Africans. Although al Qaeda hasn't pulled off a blockbuster against the United States since 9/11, the group has been linked to ambitious plots such as the 2006 plan to down as many as 10 airliners traveling from Britain to the United States and Canada, which could have killed thousands more. Under bin Laden's command, al Qaeda was the most lethal terrorist group the world has ever seen.
But al Qaeda is about much more than terrorism. It has supported, and at times seeded, insurgent movements throughout the Muslim world, and trained and funded many fighters who went to Afghanistan and Iraq. Less prominently, the movement also supported fighters who fought regimes in Algeria, Chechnya, Libya, Kashmir, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, and the Philippines. Not all of these fighters were loyal to bin Laden, but bin Laden was loyal to them; he wanted to make them more lethal so they could topple regimes he believed had turned away from Islam.
Almost all these struggles began with a local agenda. Sunni Iraqis rose against Americans in 2003 for local and nationalistic reasons, while Chechens fought Russians for independence. But over time, al Qaeda lent these local revolts a jihadist flavor, at first simply sending local recruits money and military know-how but eventually indoctrinating fighters and trying to convert their disparate causes into ones that meshed with the organization's global agenda. Al Qaeda, in short, tried to turn civil wars into cosmic ones.
The suffering exacted by al Qaeda's terrorism may be staggering, but in truth far more people have died in the civil wars the group has exacerbated. A precise accounting to sort out which deaths can be pinned on al Qaeda's tactics or ideas is impossible, but the group unquestionably poured fuel on many fires. In Iraq alone, al Qaeda-related terrorism played a major role in turning sectarian divides into a society-rending conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives and threatens Iraqi stability to this day.
Perhaps most importantly, al Qaeda is about propaganda and proselytization. The group's ideologues -- most notably Zawahiri -- have devoted tremendous attention to refuting what they see as the "errors" of other radical organizations, including groups like Hamas. Training manuals, political manifestos, and spiritual guides are all part of al Qaeda's output, much of which is on the web for easy dissemination and access. Indeed, violence for bin Laden was really just another form of propaganda, intended to inspire and educate: Striking American targets, he believed, would rally Muslims around the world and shake them from their lethargy.
It was in this ideological arena, more than anywhere else, that bin Laden was astoundingly successful. When al Qaeda was founded 23 years ago, Muslim jihadists had little love for the United States, but they were principally focused on villains closer to home: the Soviet Union, then still bogged down in Afghanistan, and the Arab world's own despots. Less than a quarter century later, bin Laden has profoundly reshaped perceptions among Muslim extremists, many of whom now embrace the late Saudi leader's identification of the United States as the number one enemy of Islam.
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