Bin-laden directly stated Al-Qaeda's goal was to bankrupt the USA. [1] Now that's not what literally happened obviously, but adjusting for propaganda hyperbole

Bin-laden directly stated Al-Qaeda's goal was to bankrupt the USA. [1] Now that's not what literally happened obviously, but adjusting for propaganda hyperbole and considering he went on to elaborate that they intend to do to the USA what they did to the Soviets - make the war too costly to be worth fighting - it seems their strategy panned out pretty well. Of course, I don't know that they could have predicted the US invasion of Iraq, for example. On the one hand, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but OTOH Al-Qaeda might have foreseen that the US leadership would not let a good crisis go to waste. Maybe the main plan was just to fight in Afghanistan, where they know they can carry out guerilla warfare indefinitely, and whatever else shakes out is probably going to play into Al-Qaeda's pocket anyway. Really the main victory Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups have won is being able to frame the discourse around their atrocities as Islamic terror. It creates tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, which leads to oppression of Muslims, which increases recruitment. In this dynamic, the worse the terror groups are, the more adherents they gain. 1: https://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/01/binladen.tape/ https://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/01/binladen.tape...