WHAT ISIS NEVER UNDERSTOOD, BUT OBL DID:

Unlike most terrorist groups, ISIS had a distinctive interest in state-building, an interest reflected in the group's propaganda. One 2015 study found that about 45 percent of ISIS media outreach focused on building and sustaining the caliphate, with messaging on "traffic police, charity work, judicial systems, hospitals and agricultural projects." At the time, there was little to suggest that this would be sustainable. As Will McCants, author of The ISIS Apocalypse, once described it to me, "The caliphate may require caution, but the apocalypse requires abandon." And, indeed, today the caliphate no longer exists. But it did exist.

Before anything else, a state--or an organization that wishes to approximate a state--must be able to provide some degree of law and order. Without order, there cannot be law, and ISIS's project was very much about law. ISIS got its biggest break with the collapse of governmental authority in Syria and Iraq in the post-Arab Spring period. The extremist group could do what discredited governments couldn't: provide Syrians and Iraqis with a degree of security, which is what they came to crave the most. A Syrian in, say, Raqqa--which had been ISIS's de facto capital--might have detested the group's ideology but still supported its rule over the alternatives, because having some security was preferable to having none.

Here, oddly enough, ISIS's absolutism was a feature rather than a bug. Terror and state-building went hand in hand. After a country collapses and descends into warring factions and rampant criminal activity, any group that hopes to reconstitute order must assume a monopoly over the use of force. This means defeating any pretenders to the throne. In an already brutal war zone, brutality can, unfortunately, work. Instilling terror in the hearts of your opponents undermines their morale, making them more likely to stand down, flee, or surrender on the battlefield.

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