USAF F-15E fighters. Flickr/Stuart Rankin. Some rights reserved.Al-Qaida evolved throughout the 1990s. By the end of the decade it had become a small but potent transnational revolutionary movement rooted in a perverse, unrepresentative version of one of the world’s main monotheistic faiths – Islam, one of the three 'religions of the book' alongside Judaism and Christianity.
Its ambitious aim was to cause the overthrow of the 'near enemy' regimes in the Middle East and southwest Asia, replacing them with 'proper' Islamist regimes; to see Zionism destroyed; and to so damage the 'far enemy' of the United States and its western partners that a new caliphate would grow outwards from the centre of Islam.
At the heart of its doctrine was an eschatological worldview whose timescales were potentially eternal. Even so, one of its key early tactics was quite specific and immediate – violent actions within the 'near' and 'far' enemies that would provoke massive overreactions and then sow dissension and chaos. 9/11 was the most substantial of these. The attack directly aimed at drawing the United States into occupying Afghanistan; instead, the US response was focused on using Northern Alliance paramilitaries as surrogate troops, and it took several years before the Taliban could return in strength.
