Osama bin Laden

"Mike was the leader of the Bin Laden unit when it was founded in 1995. His biography gets the story of the Zawahiri/Bin Laden relationship right. Over time it changed. Bin Laden really became the leader and Zawahiri the follower. Al-Qaeda is on life support or possibly even dead. It’s mostly out of business. Bin Laden founded Al-Qaeda. The idea of attacking the United States in a large-scale fashion – 9/11 – was his idea. He ran Al-Qaeda as a dictatorship, not as a democracy. There are obviously huge differences between the Nazi Party and Al-Qaeda but there is one similarity: When you joined the Nazi party you swore a personal oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Similarly, joining Al-Qaeda entailed swearing a personal oath of allegiance to Bin Laden. So Al-Qaeda became a very typical charismatic organisation led by a charismatic leader, and killing him was a final nail in the coffin. Al-Qaeda had been losing the war of ideas for years. They were absent in the Arab Spring. When Bin Laden was killed no one was carrying pictures of him in Cairo or Benghazi. His death is a punctuation point for the story of Al-Qaeda’s decline over many years. Clearly some people have taken up that brand name. The memos found in the compound where Bin Laden was living demonstrate that he was keenly aware that the Al-Qaeda brand had suffered, particularly because of Al-Qaeda’s activities in Iraq where they killed so many Muslims and civilians. He was telling groups that were thinking of using the name that it could be bad for fundraising and attract a lot of negative attention. These groups will linger, there are people who will find Al-Qaeda’s ideas attractive, but the groups are under tremendous pressure from the United States and pretty much every other country in the world. Al-Qaeda hasn’t succeeded in attacking the United States in a decade plus. Even Al-Qaeda in Yemen, which people say is a problem – all their plots against the United States have been foiled."