The Taliban’s willingness to protect al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan became much clearer following the U.S. strike that killed Ayman al Zawahiri, the successor of Osama bin Laden, the first such strike since America’s withdrawal.
Zawahiri, who has been credited with the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings that had killed hundreds in several East African cities and the 9/11 terror attacks, had been hiding at a safe house in the Sherpur area of downtown Kabul when the United States got wind of his location back in the spring. After several months of surveillance and planning, a CIA drone launched two hellfire missiles at Zawahiri on Saturday night as he stood on the balcony of the safe house, a location where he often spent his time.
A day after the administration publicized the strike, the White House is touting it as proof that the U.S. is able to launch over-the-horizon strikes, which they promoted as the primary method to be used to continue counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after the troops left.
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“[The strike] tells you we can do exactly what we said we were going to do a year ago,” National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby said in a CNN interview on Tuesday. “Over-the-horizon counterterrorism capability is possible. We have seen that over the course of this weekend.”
The administration had said it would be relying on its over-the-horizon strikes, though this was the first one to occur in Afghanistan since the military left at the end of August 2021, following just under 20 years there. There had been skeptics who raised concerns about how the U.S. would get the real-time intelligence needed without having troops there.
Nathan Sales, who previously served as ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, called the strike “a great counterterrorism success” in an interview with the Washington Examiner, though he added, “It’s too soon to claim this successful strike as a vindication of the Biden administration’s so-called over-the-horizon approach to counterterrorism. All due credit for pulling off this decapitation strike. But in order to really dismantle a terrorist organization, it takes more than one strike on the group’s leader. It takes a systematic campaign of pressure against the entire organization.”
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, agreed with Sales’s points that Zawahiri’s death took an influential target off the battlefield but noted that he’s likely not the only al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan.
Zawahiri’s hideout in Kabul did confirm some U.S. fears about the Taliban’s relationship with al Qaeda.
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“It’s proof positive that the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship remains strong, that the Taliban was always lying about its willingness to not allow Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven for terror groups,” Roggio said. “The Taliban lied about this before 9/11, they lied about it after 9/11. It lied about it during negotiations with the Trump administration, it lied about it as the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan. And the U.S. should never have trusted the Taliban.”
However, Kirby said he thinks other al Qaeda officials should be concerned for their lives regarding another possible strike.
“If I’m an al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan now, I bet you I’m thinking it is not quite the safe haven I once thought it was, and I’m sure that this is putting them on their back heels, and we’re going to have to watch and be vigilant as they try to adjust to what just happened on Saturday night,” he said.
