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While the successful targeted killing of Al Qaeda co-founder and leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri is without a doubt a counterterrorism win, the circumstances and manner of his demise reveal long-standing flaws in America’s war on terror.

When Bin Laden was killed, we learned from documents seized at his residence that he had far more influence and operational control over Al Qaeda than analysts had previously suspected. Unfortunately, with drone strikes one loses the ability to get that kind of intelligence, but one presumes that Zawahiri’s role within Al Qaeda was similar. Certainly, in the months prior to his demise, Zawahiri produced more videos and propaganda than Al Qaeda chief had managed to produce in many years.

Zawahiri was not merely a figurehead. The Egyptian doctor was a profoundly serious strategist who pioneered Al Qaeda’s strategy of blending in and attempting to appear as merely local outfits. While bin Laden’s strategy of provoking the West with high profile attacks cost Al Qaeda their safe-haven and led to retaliation, Zawahiri’ strategy saw major successes, with Al Qaeda expansion, especially in Africa, and culminating in the Arab Spring. Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and Libya played leading roles and remain highly influential. Some U.S. foreign policy wonks even advocated supporting Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria in their anxiousness to topple the Assad regime. A similar strategy of laying low and working through local jihadist elements allowed Zawahiri to ride the Taliban’s victory back into the Afghan capital of Kabul.

Zawahiri very nearly lived long enough to see his life’s dream. The overthrowing Arab regimes and replacing them with Islamist governments in much of North Africa and the Middle East was very nearly accomplished, courtesy of his strategic patience and the Obama-Biden Administration’s eagerness to partner with Islamists they refused to fully understand.

His potential victory was undone by the collapse of popular support for Islamist parties from among the Arab street and the defection of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which became ISIS, and which once again drew down the West’s wrath with high-profile actions.

Zawahiri’s death raises more questions than it answers.

Who sold him out? It does not seem credible to believe that the U.S. maintains extensive intelligence capabilities in a city where it no longer has any influence that it can watch Zawahiri, in a district filled with top-level Taliban, for months on end. The U.S. insists it had no “boots on the ground” in the operation, yet the CIA claims to have established such a detailed “pattern of life” on Zawahiri that they knew his every move. The notion that we had better intelligence in Afghanistan after having left than when we had billions of dollars of assets in country beggars’ belief and leads one to assume that someone must have betrayed Zawahiri for their own purposes. The CIA’s subsequent over-the-top campaign of post-assassination leaks, seeking to justify how successful their surveillance efforts were, comes off as misdirection and may also lend credence to this theory.

We know Zawahiri was staying in a home owned by the head of the Haqqani network, the faction of the Taliban that has always been closest to Al Qaeda. There have been previous reports of infighting between Haqqani and other Taliban factions, and it seems reasonable to suspect the death of Zawahiri may have been related in this internecine squabble. The Haqqani network is also known to have close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service known to support jihadists abroad. Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban have been strained following attacks by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). Absent a U.S. footprint in Afghanistan the U.S. drones which struck Zawahiri were almost certainly launched from within Pakistan.

Zawahiri’s’ death will not put an end to Al Qaeda, anymore than bin Laden’s death did. The presumed heir apparent is Saif al-Adel, a long time Al Qaeda leader who played a role in orchestrating the attack on U.S. troops in Somalia depicted in Black Hawk Down has long resided safely within Iran. With the Biden Administration still desperate to ink a deal with the Iranian regime, it is unlikely to aggressively prosecute the matter.

The U.S. has successfully demonstrated that with sufficient passage of time, it can find, fix, and finish any individual terrorist opponent. This is not a capability one should lightly dismissed. But all too often the U.S. lack any overarching strategy. This means our high-tech violence ultimately serves the unknown whims of local and regional actors whose motives we do not understand, rather than advancing a broader U.S. policy aligned with our national interests.


This file by Hamid Mir is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Kyle Shideler

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