Terrorism

Judged solely on outcomes, the decade-long war on terrorism has been a rousing success. Al Qaeda has been chased out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its leader and most of his lieutenants are either captured or dead. The organization is on the brink of “strategic defeat,” according to both the U.S. Defense Secretary and the director of the CIA. Across the Middle East, support for jihadist violence has plummeted. Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not mounted one successful strike on American territory—and has failed even to pull off an attack against U.S.

The Pakistani city where Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS on May 2, 2011, made for a discordant place for the principal villain of 9/11 to die. No longer cave-bound in the sawtooth mountains of Waziristan, he had bunkered down amid modern conveniences: a gas-station mini-mart selling Diet Coke, a travel agency booking flights to Rome, a Barclays bank doling rupees through its high-functioning cash machine. Along with four major hospitals, the Pakistan Military Academy, and several prestigious academic institutions, ­Abbott­abad (pronounced OPT-uh-bad by residents) is home to St.

September 11 broke open a generations-long battle raging inside Islam over who has the right to speak for the faith. On one side is the Islamic religious Establishment, embodied by the scholars who gather behind closed doors to debate theology. On the other, the self-proclaimed reformers of a diversifying global community of 1.6 billion (four fifths of whom don't reside in the Middle East), determined to apply the tenets of their faith to worldly problems.

In June, six weeks after Osama bin Laden's death in Abbottabad, Al Qaeda finally officially confirmed what had been all but a foregone conclusion: that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the prickly Egyptian surgeon who had been bin Laden's longtime deputy, is the new head of the terrorist group.

The long-held conventional view is that Zawahiri has really been the brains of the operation all along, a jihadist Karl Rove to bin Laden's George W. Bush. That was once true. But over time, bin Laden eased Zawahiri into the role of one of his followers, albeit an important one.

Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. the blind sheikh, was, in an important sense, the ideological architect or the spiritual guide of 9/11. Rahman’s directives made their appearance at an unusual event held at one of bin Laden’s bases in eastern Afghanistan on May 26, 1998, the first, and last, press conference ever given by Al Qaeda’s leaders.

For the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we asked New Yorker contributors to look back on how their work, and their lives, were changed. Here are Steve Coll’s answers.

To understand 21st century geopolitics, think of the global capitalist system: it is a marketplace, not a monopoly. In this diffuse network of nodes and connections, stronger and weaker ties, interdependencies and feedback loops, bad decisions are punished almost as quickly as the stock market punishes bad business models. We have just lived through the inaugural cycle of this geopolitical marketplace. Two decades ago, president George H.W. Bush proclaimed a "New World Order" at the United Nations General Assembly, yet today's world is multipolar and leaderless.

Much has changed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but few American institutions have changed as much as the military.

At the most basic level, it has shifted from a peacetime military to a continuously wartime military, and it has done so for the first time since the United States got rid of the draft.

Pakistan, and Pakistani-American relations, confront their worst crises in recent memory.

Pakistan's economy is in free fall, and its major cities are wracked by political violence, while Pakistani attitudes toward the United States have never been worse -- a legacy of the CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis in the city of Lahore this year, the campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal regions and the unilateral American raid to kill Osama bin Laden in northern Pakistan in May.

Pakistan, and Pakistani-American relations, confront their worst crises in recent memory. A host of interlocking challenges -- grounded in a deteriorating economy -- call into question Pakistan's ability to "muddle through" as it has in the past, and the next two or three years pose a crucial test for the country's efforts to arrest continuing socioeconomic decline.