"Zawahiri Lacks bin Laden's Charisma."
Yes, but… Western assessments of Zawahiri have almost uniformly brushed him aside as too unpopular to consolidate and hold power. Tom Donilon, Obama's national security advisor, bluntly remarked that Zawahiri "is not anywhere near the leader that Osama bin Laden was."
Zawahiri, however, has now bested bin Laden in an important category: He has survived. Zawahiri has certainly been through the fire before. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptians in the early 1980s for his involvement in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. After his release, he fled to Pakistan and then survived repeated threats in Sudan, Afghanistan, and finally Pakistan again. Meanwhile, he has become one of the chief architects of al Qaeda's mergers-and-acquisitions strategy, supporting a formal relationship with al-Shabab and encouraging al Qaeda to exploit the Arab Spring.
Zawahiri has long been one of al Qaeda's most important writers and strategic thinkers, from his 1992 Black Book to his 2001 Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, which outline al Qaeda's vision of overthrowing Arab regimes -- the "near enemy" -- and replacing them with governments that implement an extreme interpretation of sharia law. Despite the bromides and incongruities, Zawahiri's writings have been pillars of al Qaeda's ideology.
Still, Zawahiri has weaknesses. Among jihadists, he does not enjoy the swashbuckling aura of bin Laden. He is a scholar and a medical doctor, not a vaunted warrior. Zawahiri has also been a deeply polarizing figure, publicly feuding with Islamist movements and rival leaders. "Zawahiri's policy and preaching bore dangerous fruit and had a negative impact on Islam and Islamic movements across the world," Issam al-Aryan, a top Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood figure, shot back in 2007 after the al Qaeda leader criticized the Brotherhood's refusal to advocate the violent overthrow of the Egyptian government.
It is tempting to dismiss Zawahiri as an irascible leader incapable of bin Laden's strategically daring feats. But he has survived on the run for almost three decades. If his persistence and organizational savvy tell us anything, it's that he can be an implacable, dangerous, and sometimes underappreciated enemy.
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