Munich: Farhad N. was just a few months old when hijacked airliners were deliberately piloted into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, part of attacks on the United States that killed thousands of people. Twenty-five years later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for plowing a Mini Cooper car into a crowd of people in Munich, killing two people and injuring dozens.

According to Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, the 25-year-old Afghan's story underlines how the world has been shaped since 9/11, with both the terror threat and counterterrorism operations continually in flux. The 9/11 attacks were plotted by Al-Qaeda, a group led by Saudi millionaire Osama bin-Laden and sheltered by the Taliban authorities in Kabul who were subsequently driven from power. After this, Farhad N. began to grow up in a country where US-led international forces fought for 20 years to keep the Taliban at bay.

Later, Farhad was among hundreds of thousands of Afghans who left their country to seek peace and prosperity in Europe-only to become radicalized by online propaganda posted by imams in his native country. He had no affiliation or links to any specific group and appeared to have acted entirely on his own initiative. "In the old days, we would call these lone actors or lone wolves. This is the future," a former US diplomat with decades of experience in counterterrorism told RFE/RL.

RFE/RL spoke to multiple experts about how technological means that did not exist 25 years ago, including drones, AI, and social media, are creating a completely new and more dangerous environment. "We're beginning to see a lot more online presence. We're beginning to see a lot more use of influencers.in addition to the standardized actors that we have become used to in the terrorist scene, we also have lone actors, those who are influenced," retired US General Joseph Votel told RFE/RL.

Legacy Terrorists

With Al-Qaeda, the post-9/11 story has been one of franchises-groups such as Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Jamaat al Islam al Muslimin (JNIM) in the Sahel region of West Africa, which affiliated with Al-Qaeda by linking their own local goals with its ambition to mount further global attacks. This diffused structure enabled the Al-Qaeda brand to survive after US military forces pounded its leadership and deprived it of safe havens in Afghanistan in the months after 9/11.

The new US Counterterrorism Strategy, released in May, puts Al-Qaeda and "its most aggressive subgroup, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)," top of its list of what it calls "legacy Islamist terrorists." A UN report last month described AQAP as "the vanguard" of the global Al-Qaeda movement. In recent years, studies have shown how Al-Qaeda branches coordinate financing and training.

Flying Blind?

In this rapidly changing environment, there's another issue: loss of counterterrorism capacity. "We're flying blind. In the last year and a half.we've lost people and we've lost money," the former diplomat said, adding that the current geopolitical environment has exacerbated the challenge. "Right now, we're kind of in the eye of the storm between the aftermath of October 7 [the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel] and the ongoing Iran war," he went on.

Tom Sanderson from the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted a "reduction in focus on terrorism, the budgets, the personnel," while Bruce Hoffman from the Council on Foreign Relations spoke of a staff "exodus" from the State Department's counterterrorism bureau, which was restructured last year. Funding for counterterrorism began decreasing after a review in 2018 and these reductions have gained pace since 2025.

Jonathan Schroden, chief research officer at CNA, another Washington-based think-tank, told RFE/RL that there's been a key policy change in recent years. "Our goals have shifted away from the total defeat of these groups and towards the effective management of the threat that they pose.keeping that away from the US homeland," he said.