This decline has accelerated since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington. The results of 9/11 dealt these groups a deadly blow and gave the U.S. rulers and their imperialist allies the biggest opening in years to step up their “war on terrorism” at home and abroad.

As U.S. and other imperialist governments have learned from each attack by Al Qaeda, which they have systematically wiped out, the organization has relied increasingly on homegrown and amateurish groups in targeted countries.

Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadist movements say their goal is to overthrow “apostate” regimes and establish Islamic states. For these groups, the rulers of Saudi Arabia are “infidels” controlling and profaning the holy sites of Islam.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who comes from a wealthy capitalist family in Saudi Arabia, went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join U.S.-armed guerrillas fighting the Soviet invasion of that Central Asian country. He reportedly put together a list of jihadist fighters out of which the initial cadres of Al Qaeda were recruited.

The bureaucratic policies of the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, as well as the brutal 1979-89 occupation by Soviet troops, drove many to the side of landlord-backed counterrevolutionary groups, which called for a “holy war” against “atheistic communism.” With the collapse of the Moscow-backed Najibullah regime in 1992, the Taliban emerged as a major force among these reactionary guerrilla armies. Covertly financed by the Pakistani government, the Taliban captured Kabul and imposed their regime in September 1996.

The Taliban-led government gave Bin Laden refuge and a base of operations. The forces that became Al Qaeda then sought to expand their targets, hoping the takeover in Afghanistan could be repeated elsewhere. Seeking to advance that goal, they recruited combatants to fight in the wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Kashmir, among others.

The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon represented a sensational blow-off of jihadism, not a high point, however. That current has been in decline for the past two decades. Its weakening takes place in the context of the political bankruptcy and exhaustion of bourgeois nationalist currents in the Mideast and elsewhere.  
 
Exhaustion of bourgeois nationalism
After World War II, bourgeois nationalist leaderships stood at the head of a number of democratic and anti-imperialist struggles in the Mideast, from Egypt to Iran. These currents were dominant because the Stalinized Communist parties—the main political force in the workers movement—betrayed the interests of working people and the oppressed in their struggles against imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation. The anti-imperialist gains that were won, such as the nationalization of the oil wealth, led to further capitalist development, class differentiation, and the consolidation of national bourgeoisies in these countries. After the 1960s, the discrediting of the Stalinists and the growing historical exhaustion of bourgeois nationalists—which had substituted for revolutionary leaderships in that region—created a political vacuum that led to the temporary rise of Islamist groups.

The Islamic jihadists won some mass support by adopting militant, sometimes anti-imperialist rhetoric. Their high point was in the late 1970s, marked by the November 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by hundreds of Islamist rebels, who condemned the Saudi royal family for straying from the teachings of the Koran. The uprising was brutally crushed. In 1981 an Islamist group assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

Over the following two decades, however, Islamist groups have declined. These pro-capitalist currents, like the bourgeois nationalists, have proven incapable of providing leadership in anti-imperialist struggles.

Following the 1991 Gulf war, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for a number of armed actions in Saudi Arabia, such as the 1996 truck bombing of the Khobar military compound, which killed 19 U.S. soldiers and led to increased strains between Washington and the royal family. One aim of the group was to provoke a break in relations between the U.S. and Saudi governments, a situation that could then be used to incite a rebellion against the monarchy.

That too was a major objective of the 9/11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.  
 
9/11 flareout of Al Qaeda
But the opposite happened. In the days after the attack on the Twin Towers, at the request of the Saudi government—which feared reprisals against its citizens—Washington sent dozens of Saudis back home.

In 2003, most of the 5,000 U.S. troops were pulled out of Saudi Arabia and redeployed elsewhere in the region. And Washington has successfully pressed the Saudi rulers to crack down on Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups that had a base of support in that country, including among a section of the royal family.

Under the banner of the “global war on terrorism,” Washington and other imperialist governments have taken steps to transform their military into a more effective, agile force to be able to fight the wars the imperialist rulers know they will need to wage. This includes measures at home to expand police spying and disruption operations as well as legitimizing the increased use of the military in domestic “counterterrorism.”

In this way the U.S. government and its allies have proceeded to destroy Al Qaeda and similar networks around the world. Since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, they have gained collaboration from governments in the Mideast and Central and South Asia—under the threat of “either you are with us or you will suffer the consequences”—in helping to dismantle these groups.

Bombing attacks by groups like Al Qaeda have continued, from the 2004 Madrid railroad bombings to the October 1 attacks in Bali, Indonesia, which were attributed to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group linked to Al Qaeda. But they have become progressively less destructive or effective.

In the July 7 bombings, where 56 people were killed in the London subway and bus system, the police quickly arrested four individuals who are British citizens. Two weeks later, an amateurish bombing attempt there failed and the cops arrested several more individuals, all British residents.

In Iraq, the Al Qaeda group reportedly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has carried out a campaign of deadly attacks against Shiites. This included a September 14 car bombing in Baghdad that killed more than 100 day laborers.

The political evolution of these currents has some similarities with the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof Gang, Black Liberation Army, Weather Underground and other anti-working-class groups that operated in the 1960s and ’70s. Those petty-bourgeois radicals, which carried out an ultraleft course of “armed struggle,” moved increasingly toward a nihilist cult of violence and glorification of thuggery, not unlike the anarchists in the 1870s who under the leadership of Michael Bakunin sought to disrupt the International Workingmen’s Association led by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

The reactionary character of groups like Al Qaeda and their political isolation was highlighted earlier this year when hundreds of electrical workers took to the streets of Baghdad in March to protest attacks by antigovernment bombers against power plants that had killed dozens of their co-workers.  
 
 
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