US intelligence officials believe al-Qaeda will have a hard time recovering from the death of its leader, Osama bin Laden.

After all, his apparent heir, Ayman al-Zawahri, is a harsh, divisive figure who lacks the charisma and mystique that bin Laden used to hold together al-Qaeda’s various factions. Without bin Laden’s iconic figure running al-Qaeda, intelligence officials believe the group could splinter and weaken.

But if there is one thing al-Qaeda has proved it is able to do, it is adapt to adversity. Its foot soldiers learned to stay off their mobile phones to avoid US wiretaps. Their technical wizards cooked up cutting edge encryption software that flummoxed American code-breakers. And a would-be bomber managed to defeat billions of dollars in airline security upgrades with explosives tucked in his underwear.

Bin Laden’s death, by an American bullet to the head in a raid on his fortified Pakistani hideout early on Monday, came 15 years after he declared war on the United States and nearly a decade after he carried out the worst attacks on US soil. But the al-Qaeda network he leaves behind is far different from the one behind the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks.

Today, al-Qaeda’s core in Pakistan is constantly on the run, hiding from US Predator drones. Communication is slow. The ability to plan, finance and carry out attacks has been greatly reduced. Al-Qaeda franchises have sprung up in Yemen, Iraq and Algeria, where terrorists fight local grievances under the global banner of jihad.

In that regard, bin Laden’s death could be far more damaging psychologically than operationally. Al-Zawahri has been running al-Qaeda operations for years as bin Laden cut himself off from the outside world. There were no phone or Internet lines running into his compound. And he used a multi-layered courier system to pass messages. It was old-fashioned and safe but it made taking part in any operation practically impossible. Bin Laden had been reduced to a figurehead by the time US commandoes eliminated him, counterterrorism experts say.

Today, the greatest terrorist threat to the US is considered to be the al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen, far from al-Qaeda’s core in Pakistan. The Yemen branch almost took down a US-bound airliner on Christmas 2009 and nearly detonated explosives aboard two US cargo planes last autumn. Those operations were carried out without any direct involvement from bin Laden.

Bin Laden was more of a symbol than anything else. Bin Laden’s loss will be an inspirational one, rather than an operational one.

Even if the US manages to find and kill al-Zawahri, whose last-known sighting was in Peshawar in 2003, it won’t mean the end of al-Qaeda. Like Hamas and Hezbollah who have seen their leaders eliminated, al-Qaeda will probably continue to exist.

Within hours of bin Laden’s death, for instance, members of groups affiliated with the al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network in Pakistan were already promising that the day-to-day mission on the ground would not change.