The War on Terror after Afghanistan

America must “fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20,” Biden declared. He argued policymakers should turn their attention to issues such as the coronavirus pandemic, cybersecurity threats, the so-called great power competition with China, and Russia.

The president has a point. It’s clear that counterterrorism can no longer dominate the U.S. government’s attention the same way it did in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But that ended long before this or the last presidency.

The United States pivoted away from the era of large-scale warfighting during President Barack Obama’s tenure. Long gone are the days when upward of 200,000 American troops were deployed across Afghanistan and Iraq. By the time Biden was inaugurated in January, there were fewer than 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria combined. Those troops have stood up local partner forces, who assume the overwhelming majority of casualties in the fight against the Sunni jihadists. But even that limited mission is now coming to an end, as the U.S. is set to exit Afghanistan and could withdraw entirely from Iraq and Syria as well.

For many on the political Left and Right, this is a welcome step toward breaking America’s commitment to “endless wars.” Biden spoke for these people when he said that “it’s time to end the forever war.” There’s just one problem: The jihadists aren’t going to stop fighting.

And it is easy to see how the terrorists could command more of America’s attention once again in the future.

Consider this brief sketch of the jihadist threat in 2021, and how it has evolved over the past 20 years.

The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began in 2001 with a simple mission: to root out al Qaeda, which had enjoyed the Taliban’s safe haven. Taliban apologists and isolationists would later claim that the war was unnecessary, arguing that al Qaeda’s headquarters in Afghanistan was inconsequential and that the real planning for the Sept. 11 hijackings took place elsewhere, in Germany and Malaysia. This is rubbish. All 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were trained in Afghanistan. The kamikaze pilots were selected for their mission while attending camps in the country. The muscle hijackers practiced slitting the throats of camels and sheep at al Qaeda’s Afghan facilities. Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants oversaw the entire operation from the Taliban’s soil.

According to the 9/11 Commission, “perhaps as many as 20,000” volunteers received training at al Qaeda-sponsored facilities in Afghanistan between mid-1996 and Sept. 10, 2001. Al Qaeda’s senior leadership used the graduates from these camps in a series of plots against the West, including the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing, and, of course, 9/11. The U.S. had no choice but to dismantle swiftly al Qaeda’s infrastructure in Afghanistan. The country was the central hub of international terrorism in 2001.

Perhaps if the U.S. had killed bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and most of their lieutenants in the Tora Bora mountains in late 2001, then the war would have been a short one and the U.S. could have come home. Unfortunately, this did not happen. They escaped, as did Mullah Omar, the Taliban founder who repeatedly defied America and chose to stand by bin Laden both before and after 9/11. It took nearly a decade for America to catch up with bin Laden — in Pakistan.

Biden argued last month that the May 2011 raid on bin Laden’s villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan, should have been the end of the war in Afghanistan. But bin Laden’s demise did not lead to the death of al Qaeda. His longtime companion, Zawahiri, took the helm and still commands the loyalty of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of fighters around the globe to this day. There are unfounded rumors that Zawahiri died sometime last year, but there is no real evidence to support that conclusion. The U.S. military thinks he is still in hiding, biding his time somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Just as bin Laden had sworn his personal fealty to Mullah Omar, who died in 2013, Zawahiri has sworn an oath of allegiance to the Taliban’s current emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada. It is a blood oath that Akhundzada has refused to disavow.

Zawahiri isn’t the only senior al Qaeda leader who survived the 9/11 wars. At least several other al Qaeda figures are stationed inside Iran today. In August 2020, Israeli assassins, working at the behest of the U.S., gunned down one such veteran, a jihadist known as Abu Muhammad al Masri. Al Masri, who served as Zawahiri’s deputy emir, had been wanted by the U.S. government since 1998, when he allegedly helped plan al Qaeda’s bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. According to the 9/11 Commission, the Iranian regime and its chief terror proxy, Hezbollah, gave al Qaeda the “tactical expertise” needed for those attacks when they provided explosives training to al Qaeda’s men. Al Masri is survived by several other al Qaeda veterans inside Iran, including one known as Saif al Adel, a co-conspirator in the 1998 Embassy bombings who also serves as one of Zawahiri’s deputy emirs.

The State Department revealed in January that Zawahiri’s own son-in-law, a Moroccan who goes by the alias Abd al Rahman al Maghrebi, relocated to Iran. Files recovered in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound show that al Qaeda’s senior management has long thought highly of al Maghrebi and groomed him for a leadership position. The State Department describes al Maghrebi as the “longtime director” of al Qaeda’s central media arm as well as the “head” of the group’s “External Communications Office.” In that role, al Maghrebi “coordinates activities with” al Qaeda’s “affiliates” around the globe. Al Maghrebi has also been al Qaeda’s “general manager in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2012.”

The U.S. government has identified still other al Qaeda managers inside Iran, including the head of the group’s military committee. In addition, the Obama administration’s Treasury and State departments first revealed in 2011 that al Qaeda maintains a “core facilitation pipeline” inside Iran with the permission of the regime. That same facilitation network exists to this day, connecting al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan with nodes across the Middle East and Africa.

When announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan last month, Biden recognized that al Qaeda has grown in several jihadist hot spots. “Over the past 20 years, the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe,” the president said. He pointed to al Qaeda’s arms in Somalia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Syria, as well as the competing ISIS network in these areas and elsewhere.

There’s no question that the current incarnations of al Qaeda and the Islamic State are very different from bin Laden’s operation in 2001. They are geographically spread out, overseeing jihadist insurgencies across several regions. This does not mean, however, that Afghanistan is unimportant for the jihadists’ cause. Zawahiri has argued that the Taliban’s resurrected Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan could be the crown jewel in a new caliphate for the jihadists.

After the Taliban’s regime was toppled in late 2001, al Qaeda and the Taliban reorganized their efforts, launching an insurgency that today threatens the internationally recognized government in Kabul. Biden claims that al Qaeda has been “degraded” in Afghanistan. Despite suffering a string of leadership losses, there are good reasons to doubt that this is true. There is much evidence pointing to al Qaeda’s persistent presence throughout the country.

For instance, the Treasury Department reported in January that al Qaeda is “gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” Al Qaeda and the Taliban work hand in glove, with Zawahiri’s men “providing advice, guidance, and support” to the Taliban’s insurgency. The Treasury Department explained that al Qaeda continues to be closely allied with the so-called Haqqani network, which controls key leadership posts throughout the Taliban’s hierarchy.

Sirajuddin Haqqani serves as the Taliban’s deputy emir, or overall No. 2. Sirajuddin’s father, Jalaluddin, was one of Osama bin Laden’s earliest benefactors. Jalaluddin incubated the first generation of al Qaeda in his camps in eastern Afghanistan. Years after the deaths of bin Laden and Jalaluddin, the bond between their two networks remains unbroken. According to Treasury, the Haqqanis and al Qaeda have discussed setting up a new army to consolidate control over parts of Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal.

It is understandable that many Americans want to wash their hands of the post-9/11 wars. America has made many mistakes. The cost in blood and treasure has been high. The war in Iraq was a disastrous mistake that created many new problems. The American leaders overseeing the war in Afghanistan have been feckless. And Americans have many other more pressing concerns today.

But the withdrawal from Afghanistan will not “end” the war. The jihadists will fight on. And we should not be surprised if they choose to target the U.S., or American interests elsewhere, once again.

Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and is senior editor of FDD’s Long War Journal.