On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.

The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.

Within days of the murderous assault, the then president, George W Bush, had begun framing the US response as a global “war on terror”, a clumsy, inappropriate and counterproductive strategic choice.

For those of us reporting on the ground during this period – watching US bombers over Afghan mountains and tanks in Baghdad streets, interviewing aspirant suicide bombers or the victims of attacks by extremist groups that proliferated from the UK to the Philippines – the errors and failures of this “war on terror” were glaring.

This unprecedented and indiscriminate series of campaigns would lead to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, involve torture, renditions and alliances with dubious regimes, cost huge amounts of money, destabilise swathes of the Middle East and bring suffering to millions of people.

Was this what Bin Laden had hoped to achieve?

It is frequently suggested that Bin Laden’s aim with the 9/11 attacks was to draw the US into wars that would weaken its economy and lead to its eventual collapse, much as the Soviet Union had been fatally drained by the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. As a young militant, Bin Laden had witnessed this conflict and even participated in it, albeit in a........

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