Very cool question. We don't have the answers, but here are a few thoughts.
Who benefits? There is only one beneficiary of Al Qaeda as a virtual actor: the US Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Congressional Complex whose outrageously wasteful funding and excessive (70%) obligations to contractors are bankrupting the US economy, but who cares as long as the corporate gravy train keeps rolling along. The indigenous peoples seeking self-determination, including the long-repressed people of Saudi Arabia and the long-repressed peoples of Palestine, do not benefit from a model that Mahatma Gandhi clearly understood was self-destructive. Non-violence is the only sustainable path to self-determination.
Calculating value. With the above firmly in mind, Al Qaeda's “value” to the sole beneficiary, the MIICC, is a combination of three sums:
1. The sums Al Qaeda and related groups receive from governments, corporations, and individuals interested in sustaining radical Islamic violence against both Muslims and the West.
2. The sums the US and others spend on false flag operations attributed to Al Qaeda (the underpants bomber is probably an Israeli false-flag operation with US consent and colalboration)
3. The sums the MIICC receives from a corrupt Congress that has not done a serious national security baseline evaluation of need since Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) retired from his post as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
What is Al Gaeda Worth? Our wild-ass but informed guess is $1 trillion a year. That one trillion a year is both positive value (for those that benefit) and negative value (for all the others). With one trillion a year we could have brought the USA into the 21st Century, funded free cell phones for the five billion poor so they could create infinite stabilizing and self-sustaining wealth, and created a prosperous world at peace.
