Osama bin Laden's decision to launch the 9/11 attacks made him one of the most consequential figures of the early 21st century. The ensuing "war on terror" cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 7,000 American service personnel, and tens of thousands more people were killed in seemingly endless wars around the Muslim world.

After 9/11, bin Laden was reviled as a mass murderer but also, in some quarters, celebrated as a hero who had ostensibly stood up to the all-powerful United States. As a result, many myths have proliferated about this man who changed the course of history.

Myth No. 1: 9/11 was bin Laden's brilliant ploy to entangle the U.S. in wars.

Bin Laden’s actual plan was to use the 9/11 attacks to force the United States to pull all of its forces out of the Middle East. That strategy spectacularly backfired, and instead the United States occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before 9/11, bin Laden was convinced that the United States was a "paper tiger" and that its likely response to the attacks would be an ineffectual round of cruise missile strikes and perhaps some manned bomber raids. He didn't anticipate that a relatively small group of CIA officers and U.S. Special Forces, calling in massive American airstrikes and allied with Afghan militias on the ground, would overthrow his Taliban hosts in only three months.

Myth No. 2: Al-Qaida and the Taliban can be easily disentangled.

Experts on the Taliban claimed after the attacks that the militants were never really that close to al-Qaida. In fact, documents recovered from bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after he was killed in a U.S. Navy SEAL raid on May 2, 2011, show that rather than breaking off contacts after 9/11, the Taliban and al-Qaida maintained warm relations. They continued to cooperate on military operations, and al-Qaida even provided funding to the Taliban. That friendly relationship persists, according to a United Nations report this year, which concluded that the Taliban and al-Qaida "remain close."

Myth No. 3: Pakistan protected bin Laden.

When bin Laden was discovered to be living in Abbottabad, not far from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, many believed that Pakistani officials must have protected him. Yet in the thousands of pages of letters and memos written by bin Laden or sent to him by his closest associates that were recovered in his compound, there is no evidence that he was in contact with Pakistani officials, nor that they had any clue about where he was hiding. After the raid, I spoke on the record to a range of senior U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama; John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser; and the chairman of the joint chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, all of whom said Pakistani officials had no idea that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.

Myth No. 4: Iran and al-Qaida were allies.

In reality, al-Qaida's relations with Iran were quite fraught. After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, a number of bin Laden family members and al-Qaida leaders fled to Iran, where they were placed under house arrest. The documents found in bin Laden's compound show that he was extremely paranoid about the Iranians and was concerned that they might have planted tracking devices on some of his relatives when they were released. There is no evidence that Iran and al-Qaida ever cooperated on terrorist attacks.

Myth No. 5: Bin Laden was a blowhard who never fought on the front lines.

In fact, there are a multitude of witness accounts of bin Laden fighting with almost suicidal bravery against the Soviets. He set up a base in Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan, and took part in a pitched battle there in 1987. Bin Laden's wartime heroics were documented in two books in Arabic and also by a young Saudi reporter named Jamal Khashoggi, who later became a Washington Post contributing columnist. (Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi operatives in Istanbul in 2018.) After 9/11, bin Laden summoned hundreds of his followers to the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan to fight the Americans. There they holed up in caves for weeks, during which U.S. war planes dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance. In the middle of December 2001, bin Laden slipped away, eluding the United States for another decade.

Peter Bergen is the author of "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden," from which this article is adapted.