This month, Americans—and the world—will once again mark the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The assault, which claimed thousands of American lives, unleashed a decades-long U.S. military campaign, which included wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But to Osama bin Laden and the other members of al Qaeda who planned the 9/11 attacks, “the assault was no mere act of terrorism,” Nelly Lahoud wrote in a 2021 essay. “To them, it represented something far grander: the opening salvo of a campaign of revolutionary violence that would usher in a new historical era.” This week, we’re featuring Lahoud’s article on what a trove of internal documents revealed about bin Laden’s objectives—and why he largely failed to achieve them.

In 2011, U.S. forces raided bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the al Qaeda leader and members of his family. They also managed to recover hundreds of thousands of files, among them bin Laden’s own notes and correspondence. Lahoud, a scholar of terrorist organizations including al Qaeda and ISIS, spent three years analyzing these newly discovered communications. The documents, she wrote, “provide an unparalleled glimpse into bin Laden’s mind and offer a portrait of the U.S. ‘war on terror’ as it was seen through the eyes of its chief target.”

Bin Laden’s correspondence revealed the severity of his miscalculation when it came to the 9/11 attacks: namely that he “never anticipated that the United States would go to war in response to the assault.” The American public, he had predicted, would take to the streets and call for Washington to withdraw from the Middle East. Instead, it rallied behind U.S. President George W. Bush and his drive to war. The 9/11 attacks “turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al Qaeda,” Lahoud wrote. “The group shattered in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban regime’s collapse, and most of its top leaders were either killed or captured.”

Still, “it is impossible to look back at the past two decades and not be struck by the degree to which a small band of extremists led by a charismatic outlaw managed to influence global politics,” she wrote. “Bin Laden did change the world—just not in the ways that he wanted.”