Al-Qaeda has ended. The organization that Osama bin Laden founded and led, that attacked the United States 25 years ago and killed 2,977 innocent Americans in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania, no longer survives—and U.S. officials should say so, instead of burnishing the group’s legacy by acting and speaking as if it still exists. Terrorism has not ceased, jihadism has not gone away, and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran may ignite more anti-American sentiment and violence. But the group that attacked the United States on 9/11 is finished.

In the years following that assault, thousands of Americans dedicated their lives to avenging the victims. The nationwide horror of watching planes go into towers—innocent people crushed, burned, or jumping to their deaths—catalyzed a passionate response. And the cost to those who responded was high: in the post-9/11 wars, more than 15,000 U.S. military members and contractors died in combat, and some 1.8 million became disabled. And from 2012 to 2021, four times as many active-duty or veteran military members died by suicide as died in combat. Service members from loyal U.S. allies, especially Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, joined the United States in combat; hundreds of them died fighting alongside Americans. They and their families deserve to know their efforts were not in vain. Washington and its allies lost the war in Afghanistan but succeeded against al-Qaeda.

Jihadist terrorism persists as a threat, and not every group using the name “al-Qaeda” has been neutralized. Dangerous organizations operate in the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the Sahel, and South Asia. They carry out attacks and hold territory, and some have come close to taking down governments, especially in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. Jihadists of various stripes train in Taliban-governed Afghanistan—a development that must be closely monitored. But none of what are sometimes called “al-Qaeda affiliates” is centrally directed or led by bin Laden’s organization, and officials should cease suggesting they are, since doing so inflates the threat they pose without making it any easier to combat them. Indeed, it would be best to cease using the term “al-Qaeda affiliate” altogether.

Studying the pattern of attacks tied directly to al-Qaeda shows how the central organization ran out of steam. Before 9/11, the core al-Qaeda organization kept up a steady pace of global operations against U.S. targets, with a track record that included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (six dead, more than 1,000 injured), the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers (19 killed, hundreds injured), the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (224 killed, thousands injured), and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole (17 killed). After 2001, core al-Qaeda’s efforts against the U.S. homeland included a fumbled 2001 attempt to ignite a bomb placed in a shoe on an airliner bound for Miami and a failed 2009 suicide bombing plot targeting the New York City subway. The group caused more pain for U.S. friends and allies than for the United States itself, with deadly attacks in Bali in 2002, Riyadh in 2003, and London in 2005. But following that spike in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the momentum shifted to other jihadist groups, and after 2009, core al-Qaeda’s global operations essentially ceased.

For decades, I have studied........

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