At the outset, it is worth mentioning that Al-Qaeda is highly dangerous, and that its senior surviving leaders possess the will, desire, and asabia to strike inside the United States. But five years after September 11, the transnationalist organisation does not seem capable of carrying out its repeated threats against the "head of the snake" - America.

Why has not Al-Qaeda delivered on its promises? Far from being a breakthrough for Al-Qaeda, my argument is that September 11 was a disaster. Transnationalist jihadists like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are isolated and internally encircled within the Muslim world and the broader jihadist movement.

One cannot understand Al-Qaeda's inability to carry out attacks along the 9/11 lines without understanding the internal struggle and turmoil among jihadists, one that is tearing their movement apart. The balance of forces has shifted dramatically against global jihadists in favor local jihadists and mainstream Islamists who are struggling, often against great odds and under enormous pressures, to accommodate themselves to gradual social and political change in their societies. While Al-Qaeda's jihadists dominate our thoughts and headlines – often portrayed as omnipotent and too powerful, yet they are in the minority. A tiny minority.

The primary goal of modern jihadism is and always has been the destruction of the atheist political and social order at home and its replacement with authentic Islamic states. But since the late 1990s, these jihadists have fought bitterly among themselves. It was then that bin Laden and his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, launched a campaign to hijack the movement and change its direction— away from attacking al-Adou al-Qareeb, the "near enemy" (Muslim "apostates" and "renegades") and toward attacking al-Adou al-Baeed, or the "far enemy" (the United States and its allies).

By taking on the United States, which in the eyes of so many Muslims is most responsible for maintaining the grim status quo in the Arab world, Al-Qaeda jihadists wanted to achieve two goals: rid Muslim countries of corrupting American and Western cultural and political influences, as well as military presence, particularly from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Prophet Mohammed; and destabilise Muslim governments and their ruling elite by inciting the rising generation.

September 11 was bin Laden's attempt to turn the wheels of political fortune in his favor by proving to the Muslim world that he and his brethren now represented the vanguard of the ummah or "Muslim community". He and Zawahiri, his right-hand man, believed that the very outrageous boldness of the attacks would attract new recruits.

Their gamble did not pay off: neither the ummah, nor the bulk of jihadists were on the same wavelength as Al-Qaeda. The vast majority of local jihadists, (in the upper ninety percent) did not join Al-Qaeda. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda found itself alone facing the brunt of the American armada. Rather than welcoming a wave of seasoned jihadis and fresh volunteers to serve in the Afghan theater, they received only a modest trickle of recruits.

Instead of expressing solidarity with their besieged and entrapped associates on the Afghan–Pakistani border, prominent jihadist figures openly condemned Al-Qaeda for exacerbating the problems facing other jihadist groups. They viewed September 11 as a catastrophic blunder.

The jihadists are engaged in a bitter quarrel that reveals deep and wide rifts. Instead of closing ranks against "the enemies of Islam", as bin Laden and Zawahiri had hoped, September 11 destroyed any possibility of bridging the gulf between local and international jihadists. Al-Qaeda is unquestionably the real loser, for it desperately needs loyal allies and revolutionary legitimacy; its supposed natural partners not only deny it that recognition but attack it relentlessly.

The social forces employed against Al-Qaeda represent a broad ideological spectrum, ranging from former militant Islamists, mainstream Islamists to leftists and the nationalistic mainstream, all openly opposed to the global jihad. Fault lines have emerged within the bin Laden network itself. In fact, the multiple internal conflicts among jihadists call to question the very functioning of the jihadist enterprise as a whole, not just international organisations like Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Al-Qaeda now faces a war on two fronts: within and without. I would argue that of all factors the war within has been the decisive factor in undermining Al-Qaeda's operational ability to wage war against the United States.

This intra-Islamist tug-of-war has hardly been noticed, let alone critically examined in the West and the United States, in particular. US policy makers have focused on Al-QaedaÕs sleeping cells and sympathisers, but little has been said about the other huge pool of local jihadists and Islamists who, if they had joined the Al-Qaeda network, could have qualitatively increased the security risks manifold.

This failure goes to the heart of why the Bush administration wrongly portrays Al-Qaeda as a strategic threat – rather than a security nuisance - to the homeland.

Contrary to the received wisdom in the United States, the dominant Muslim response to Al-Qaeda reveals that few activists and ordinary Muslims embraced its global cause. Although ordinary Muslims may emphathise with Al-Qaeda's grievances against the international order, particularly US foreign policy, they are unwilling to commit to war and fight on bin Laden's behalf.

Public surveys and interviews with young Muslim activists indicate clearly that few are willing to join the global jihad network - a salient point missed by American commentators and senior policymakers, who concentrated on Al-Qaeda and international jihadis and overlooked both the fault lines among the jihadist movement and the vast societal opposition to its cause.

Had they tuned in to the internal struggles roiling Muslim lands they would have had second thoughts about the military expansion of the war on terror; they would have realized that — though quite deadly — Al-Qaeda is a tiny fringe organisation with no viable and entrenched social constituency.

Had they observed the debates and actions of former jihadis and Islamists they would have known that the jihadist movement is being torn apart, that Al-Qaeda does not speak for or represent religious nationalists or the Muslim public at large. American commentators and policymakers would also have realised that the internal encirclement of Al-Qaeda, i.e., building alliances with Muslim civil societies, is the most effective means of hammering a deadly nail into its coffin.

The way to go is not the declaration of a worldwide war against an unconventional, paramilitary foe with little or no social base of support, nor is it to settle scores with old regional dictators. That is exactly what bin Laden and his cohorts had hoped the United States would do - lash out militarily and angrily against the ummah. As Seif al-Adal, Al-Qaeda's overall military commander, recently put it, "the Americans took the bait and fell into our trap."