Why Osama bin Laden still matters

In late January, Osama bin Laden released an audiotape praising the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009. "The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of [September] 11th," he said.

While the tape was proof that Al Qaeda’s leader was still alive, it also raised the question of whether he’s now only an irrelevant militant seeking to associate himself with even failed attacks originated by groups he doesn’t control. After all, the organization behind the botched bombing was Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, headquartered in Yemen, thousands of miles from bin Laden’s presumed base on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bin Laden’s irrelevance seemed further confirmed in June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News that Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is now "relatively small…I think at most we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100."

For some, these small numbers suggest that bin Laden’s organization is fading away, and that the war against it is largely won. But the fact is that Al Qaeda has always been a small organization. According to the FBI, there were only 200 sworn members at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and the group has always seen itself primarily as an ideological and military vanguard seeking to influence and train other jihadist groups.

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Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and at New York University’s Center on Law and Security, and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader. He is a national security analyst for CNN.