In May 2011, President Barack Obama announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who oversaw the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Obama called bin Laden’s death “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”
The problem for Obama is that “defeating al-Qaeda” is no longer a meaningful frame for the struggle to make the world safe from terrorism and violence—and yet the United States and its allies still regularly invoke it to make sense of their own actions.
Five years since bin Laden was 'taken out,' the world is dogged by far more violence and destruction than he ever caused.
