Word: qaeda
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Even among those who share much of bin Laden's animus toward the U.S. and Israel, al-Qaeda has remained largely irrelevant, its strategy of global jihad rejected in favor of an Islamist radicalism focused on more limited national goals...
...Muslim world, there was a pervasive refusal to believe that Muslims had been responsible for the attacks, even after bin Laden claimed responsibility. The denial inherent in the tendency common from Egypt to Indonesia to blame Mossad or the CIA for 9/11 reveals a damning negation of al-Qaeda's tactics. So repulsive was the mass murder of innocents to ordinary Muslims that most refused to celebrate the attacks, as bin Laden had hoped they might, but instead sought to blame them on those deemed enemies of Islam. (Read "How to Remember 9/11...
...Even in countries where al-Qaeda had hoped to capitalize on resentment against American influence, its networks were largely rolled up by security services as the population looked on indifferently. By invading Iraq, the Bush Administration probably did a far more effective job than bin Laden of weakening U.S. influence in the Muslim world and rallying its youth to resistance. Yet even in Iraq, al-Qaeda's efforts to gain control of the resistance failed because its ideology and tactics were so loathsome to even the bulk of the Sunni insurgents fighting the Americans that they eventually made common cause...
Similarly, in Afghanistan, bin Laden's erstwhile stomping ground, the fight against the U.S. is being waged by the Taliban, which may once have been an ally of al-Qaeda but now exists entirely independently of bin Laden's movement and will ultimately make its strategic decisions based on its national interests. The sobering reality for bin Laden is that even among those dedicated to resisting the U.S. and its allies, his ideology of global jihad against the "far enemy" (the U.S.) has failed to supplant the more pragmatic Islamist movements such as Hamas, Hizballah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood...
...enforcement and intelligence problem. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," he told the New York Times, suggesting that the goal was to reach a point at which the specter of al-Qaeda "isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life...