What was Al Zawahiri doing in Kabul?

"Biden's greatest foreign policy triumph" inescapably refers back to his "greatest calamity" in the international arena: the shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Published by

Mario Noya

2 de agosto, 2022

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The most timely article of the day was written by Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute in The Washington Post, the newspaper of the resoundingly eloquent obituaries:

As could not be otherwise, Thiessen, former head of the team that wrote speeches for President George W. Bush, congratulates himself that "a murderous terrorist with the blood on his hands of thousands of Americans has been removed from the face of the Earth" and congratulates Joe Biden for having authorized the air strike that killed the Al Qaeda leader this weekend. But it turns out that "Biden's greatest foreign policy triumph" inescapably refers to his "greatest foreign policy disgrace": the shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan.

It was precisely in Afghanistan that Ayman al-Zawahiri lived. And "not in some remote cave in the Hindu Kush mountains but in the very heart of Afghanistan's Taliban-controlled capital," writes Thiessen, not without first pointing out that last year, on the occasion of the ominous withdrawal, Biden claimed that Al Qaeda was no longer in the country, while Secretary of State Blinken claimed that only "remnants" of the organization founded by Bin Laden remained and that they did not pose the slightest danger to the United States.

What was Zawahiri up to, why was he stirring up anti-American terrorism?, Thiessen asks in his must-read article. "Unfortunately, we might never know," he answers right away, only to return again to the August 2021 withdrawal:

Unlike the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden, the operation that killed Zawahiri was not carried out by a team of U.S. Special Operations forces. That’s because, thanks to Biden, the United States no longer has boots on the ground. Zawahiri had to be taken out by drone strike, which means we had no ability to exploit the site where Zawahiri was killed by collecting pocket litter, computers, hard drives, cellphones, documents or other material intelligence. The bin Laden raid produced a trove of information on al-Qaeda’s operations, ongoing plots, the identities and locations of al-Qaeda personnel and other vital actionable intelligence. The drone strike that vaporized Zawahiri destroyed all the actionable intelligence he possessed along with him.

In closing, Thiessen says the lesson of this episode is clear, "Al Qaeda is back in Afghanistan," and, just as he credits Biden for the elimination of their leader, he also blames him for "creating the conditions that allowed the world's most wanted terrorist to move to downtown Kabul and set up operations in a city that had been liberated from Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies with the blood of courageous American service members."