Twenty one years after he first became a US target for his involvement in 9/11 planning, and ten years after US Navy Seals killed his al-Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden, the US finally caught up with Ayman al-Zawahiri with a deadly drone strike in Kabul. However belated, the operation represents a significant political coup for President Biden, currently languishing in the polls, and a vindication of his insistence that military withdrawal from Afghanistan does not end the US capacity to wage war against terrorist organisations.
Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Trump’s envoy who negotiated the original withdrawal agreement, called the strike a validation of the rationale for pulling out. “In this case, over the horizon worked,” he said.
The discovery by US intelligence of Zawahiri in the plush Kabul suburb also gave the lie to Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, and their solemn assurances in Doha in February 2020 as part of its drive for international recognition that it “will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the US and its allies”.
Taliban complaints that the US drone strike itself represents a breach of Doha ring somewhat hollow in that context, not least because Zawahiri appears to have been a guest of the hardline Haqqani faction of the government.
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The death of Zawahiri will not, however, transform the nature of the threat facing the US and Europe. No major al-Qaeda attack on a western target has been coordinated from Afghanistan for many years, the operational threat having passed to branches and affiliates in the Middle East and Africa built in no small measure by Zawahiri himself. And the al-Qaeda leader, who has been unwell for some time, will be quickly replaced by the organisation.
The group and the Taliban will also take no comfort from evidence that Pakistan, too long at best a passive ally, clearly gave permission for its airspace to be used by the US drone.