>They've never witnessed functioning policy on any front. Bin Laden wanted to destroy America, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

This is revisionism. The agenda of al-Qaeda was to establish a caliphate. The whole "al‑Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States" meme was just a pivot after they got pummeled by the US army, after 9/11. That's not to say the US won, but the US losing isn't the same as al‑Qaeda winning.

>al-Qaeda[a] is a pan-Islamist militant organization led by Sunni Islamist jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda

Did they need the real estate under the World Trade Center to establish a caliphate?