Osama bin Laden is dead. His strategy is still working.

Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is worth saying something my fellow Americans might not like.

Osama bin Laden is winning.

Bin Laden could not defeat the United States militarily. He needed us to exhaust ourselves and change ourselves.

Not that he won. He didn’t. American special operators found him in Pakistan in 2011, shot him dead, and dumped his body into the Arabian Sea — probably. Al-Qaeda never destroyed the United States, overthrew the Saudi monarchy, conquered Jerusalem, or established the worldwide caliphate bin Laden imagined.

But bin Laden had a strategy. And a disturbing amount of it worked.

He wanted American forces out of Saudi Arabia. The large post-Gulf War presence ended in 2003, although the United States never fully left.

He wanted to draw the United States into long, expensive wars in the Muslim world. We obliged him beyond his wildest expectations.

In 2004, bin Laden spoke explicitly of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” He did not bankrupt us. Not yet.

The national debt stood at about $5.8 trillion in 2001. Today it is roughly $40.6 trillion. Afghanistan and Iraq did not cause all of that. Not remotely. But the post-9/11 wars consumed enormous sums, and the debt accumulated over the same quarter-century now constrains American choices at home and abroad. By 2009 alone, Congress had provided more than $800 billion to the Pentagon for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and related operations.

We occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, invaded Iraq, and finally fled Kabul while the Taliban returned to power.

Through all of this, we preserved the serene conviction that the United States remained a colossus bestriding the earth.

My old teacher Angelo Codevilla saw the danger almost immediately. Writing after 9/11, Codevilla offered a pitiless standard for victory: You win when you force the enemy to change how he lives without changing how you live.

By that standard, Osama bin Laden is winning. He’s dead. We changed.

We built a permanent security superstate. We accepted surveillance, watch lists, airport humiliations, emergency powers, and a sprawling homeland security bureaucracy as ordinary features of American life.

We spent trillions fighting wars whose political objectives we never clearly defined. What political result did we expect from occupying Afghanistan for two decades? What political result did we expect from Iraq?

What did victory look like?

Our “statesmen” never really answered those questions, especially the last one.

Instead, we confused military superiority with political wisdom and the ability to destroy things with the ability to produce outcomes we wanted.

Exploiting our misapprehension was central to bin Laden’s strategy.

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He could not defeat the United States militarily. He needed us to exhaust ourselves and change ourselves. We did both.

Then something remarkable happened after he was dead.

In November 2023, young Americans began passing around bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” on TikTok. Some said reading it changed how they understood American foreign policy. Many of the people encountering his propaganda had little or no memory of 9/11.

They were not joining al-Qaeda. But some read the justification offered by the man responsible for murdering nearly 3,000 Americans and thought: Maybe he had a point.

Sure, Bin Laden was dead. His argument had outlived him.

America today is also considerably more Muslim than the America he attacked. Muslims remain a small minority — about 1.6% of the population — but their cultural and political presence is far more significant than it was in 2001.

None of that is sinister in itself — necessarily. Most American Muslims are not bin Ladenists. They don’t have to be. Why flatten skyscrapers when you can get your co-religionist elected mayor of the very place where the towers fell? Or gradually take over a city?

And although the idea of religious liberty is not something we should readily throw away, religion must conform to our constitutional norms and small-“r” republican form of government. With citizenship comes certain obligations.

George Washington put it beautifully in his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport. The United States, he wrote, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

But Washington continued: The government “requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

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There are two halves to the bargain. The republic protects you. You owe something to the republic.

We have become very good at talking about the first proposition and almost embarrassed by the second. That’s a deadly mistake. Sharia law, strictly speaking, is incompatible with our Constitution.

Nations can lose without being conquered. They can dissipate power. They can mistake reputation for strength. They can confuse yesterday’s dominance with today’s reality.

And they can change themselves so thoroughly in response to an enemy that they forget what victory was supposed to preserve.

Bin Laden is dead. Codevilla’s question remains: Who changed whom?

Our enemies did not reorganize themselves around us. We reorganized ourselves around them.

That’s why, a quarter-century after 9/11 and 15 years after bin Laden’s death, the answer is so terrible: He’s winning the long war, and we’re losing.