Don’t get me wrong. I’m delighted that al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri is dead. And I’m happier still that President Joe Biden, given his well-known opposition to the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, authorized this operation.
But while it’s always good to take out a terrorist leader, the White House is characterizing the strike as vindication of Biden’s reckless and deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which was the most disastrous foreign policy blunder by a U.S. president in modern memory. Our hasty and perilous exit left us with neither a military nor an intelligence presence inside the country. We all but handed the Taliban a regime, which has since become a hotbed for terrorists, Zawahiri included.
In the days following the fall of Kabul, Biden administration officials assured us this was OK because of our superior “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capabilities. West Point’s Lieber Institute explains this concept best: “The United States will monitor terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS-K without boots on the ground; develop actionable targets by means of sophisticated intelligence operations; and launch aerial strikes from regional locations.”
As any president would, Biden used a prime-time address to the nation on Monday night after Zawahiri was killed to take a victory lap. He touted the good news that justice had been delivered. The mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks “was no more,” Biden said.
The president made sure to tell Americans the leader of al Qaeda, a man with a $25 million bounty on his head, had been on the most wanted list “for years under presidents [George W.] Bush, Obama, and Trump.” But he, our powerful, steadfast commander in chief, had managed to get the job done.
“When I ended our military mission in Afghanistan almost a year ago, I made the decision that after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan to protect America from terrorists who seek to do us harm,” Biden said. “And I made a promise to the American people that we would continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond. We’ve done just that.”
In a Tuesday morning appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America, national security adviser Jake Sullivan echoed Biden’s remarks. He said, “Taking him [al Zawahiri] out has undoubtedly made the United States safer.”
He continued, “It has proven the president right when he said one year ago that we did not need to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan fighting and dying in a 20-year war to be able to hold terrorists at risk and to defeat threats to the United States. … He proved that with this decisive strike over the weekend.”
Biden and Sullivan are giving themselves way too much credit. One successful attack on a single terrorist, albeit a valuable one, is not proof that over-the-horizon intelligence gathering works. Especially when we recall the last time the U.S. conducted a military operation inside Afghanistan. On Aug. 29, 2021, a U.S. missile strike based on faulty intelligence left 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, dead.
Zawahiri’s death demonstrates only that Afghanistan has become a sanctuary for terrorists — just as we’d feared. That the world’s most wanted terrorist felt comfortable enough to live openly in Kabul speaks volumes.
A United Nations Security Council assessment published in January concluded that “terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom in Afghanistan than at any time in recent history” because of the U.S.’s withdrawal. Similarly, the Council on Foreign Relations reported in April that the terrorist presence in Afghanistan had doubled since Biden gave the order to leave.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained: “It’s one thing to plan an operation to eliminate a high-profile target and another to track, infiltrate, and destroy an active cell involved in carrying out specific terrorist operations without an on-the-ground presence and an intelligence network.”
Does it sound like over-the-horizon counterterrorism in Afghanistan is working to you?
The legacy media, which were widely critical of Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan at the time, are also promoting the Democrats’ latest fiction. They appear to have forgotten the president handed the country back to the Taliban last August, leaving behind Americans, our Afghan allies, and sophisticated U.S. weapons, equipment, and military vehicles valued at over $80 billion.
It’s also clear that media coverage of a terrorist’s death depends on the political party of the president who occupies the White House.
After former President Donald Trump ordered the strike that killed Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, in October 2019, the Washington Post published an obituary that described him as an “austere religious scholar.”
And when Trump ordered an airstrike that took out Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, the media were outraged. They claimed this “assassination” would trigger a war with Iran. Even Biden, at the time, claimed Trump was putting at risk the security of U.S. citizens. “The last thing we need is another war in the Middle East,” he said. “My greatest worry is: Does anyone have confidence that Donald Trump has thought through what the next steps are?”
Still, I must give Biden his due. The death of Zawahiri is a foreign policy success.
However, it does not prove the effectiveness of over-the-horizon intelligence operations. Nor does it make up for the most disgraceful failure of U.S. leadership since the fall of Saigon. Biden’s poor judgment made the world a more dangerous place and will always be remembered as a humiliating military defeat.
Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many websites, including MSN, RedState, Newsmax, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics. Please follow Elizabeth on Twitter or LinkedIn.
