To consider the 9/11 attack a failure because it did not achieve Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal of pushing the United States out of the Middle East or spurring a pan-Islamic revolution is to misread their strategy and to judge them by the standards of conventional warfare. Terrorists quite often have a large goal, but they know that the chances of reaching it in one blow are fairly negligible. They just do what they can to start off their chain reaction. Their enemy is the status quo, and their success can be measured by the impact of their actions as it plays out over the years.
