Al-Qaida after ten years of war

the long version

Since the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States has been at war with al-Qaida. Over the past 10 years, counterterrorism efforts have disrupted its main training facilities and eliminated much of the core leadership structure, including the mastermind Usama Bin Ladin. Despite this, al-Qaida has proved resilient. While the core leadership has been compromised, regional al-Qaida offshoots and affiliated Islamist terrorist groups have formed, developed, and become prominent in their own right. To aid in examining and explaining al-Qaida's trajectory, the Minerva Initiative at Marine Corps University hosted a conference in the spring of 2011, just days before Bin Ladin's demise. The panels at this conference addressed diverse issues such as al-Qaida's overarching strategy; the degree of control that central al-Qaida leadership maintains over regional franchises; and the strategies, tactics, successes, and failures in each theater of operation. The resulting papers contribute to the ongoing and ever-evolving net assessment of al-Qaida and its future prospects, and they help inform the crafting of a war termination phase with al-Qaida.