TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Some have taken to arguing that bin Laden was somehow victorious.

Ross Douthat explains why this isn’t so:

Keep in mind that for Bin Laden, increased American military involvement in the Muslim world wasn’t an end unto itself. Rather, it was a means to a larger goal: The spread of global jihad, the empowerment of a particular strain of Salafi Islam at the expense of more moderate alternatives, and ultimately the restoration of a pan-Islamic caliphate. Are those goals any closer to fruition today than they were on September 10, 2001? I don’t think they are.

He’s absolutely right. Bin Laden’s goal with September 11th was to embroil the U.S. in an intractable war in the Middle East, in order to (1) cause the collapse of Arab regimes across the Middle East and (2) to both inspire Muslims with an attack on the U.S. and to infuriate them with the U.S.’s invasion, so they would rise up and support his cause.

That plan failed. Miserably. People across the Middle East turned against al Qaeda after September 11th and is now an after-thought in people’s minds. The people are not supporting Islamist causes; indeed, Arabs have risen up against their regimes not on Islamist grounds, but rather on secular grounds—because they have been repressed.

He absolutely failed. He had his opportunity—our bungling of the Iraq war, and the ensuing chaos from the sectarian war that resulted, provided an opening to take over one of the region’s most strategically important countries, but bin Laden and Zarqawi failed. Their strategy of turning the Shiites and Sunnis against each other to create chaos initially worked, but then they turned against fellow Sunnis, too. This broke them from the greater Sunni insurgency and the Sunni community, and the U.S. was able to gather the support of Sunnis and Sunni insurgents against al Qaeda in Iraq.

If they had succeeded in Iraq, and took over the country, things may very well have turned out quite different. Iraq would have been an ideal base to begin building the caliphate; it is rich in Islamic history, has oil supplies and sits between Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. But they failed.

Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are certainly still a threat, but they are not the threat they were before and immediately after September 11th. They can still do significant damage, but that’s all we should fear. We should no longer be afraid of anything more than that. They failed.

That doesn’t mean that we should withdraw from Afghanistan immediately, however. The situation there is almost identical to when the Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan in the 1980s, and our failure to deal with it then allowed the Taliban to take over and the militant movement to grow in Afghanistan and Pakistan, giving birth to al Qaeda. If we fail to deal with it now, we may be facing the same threat in the future.