As John Kerry might say, he, uh, wasn’t supposed to be doing that.
That was, if you’ll recall, Kerry’s famously perplexed response to news that a jihadi whom he’d not long freed from Gitmo had gone right on back to his jihadin’ ways. I mean, what gives with those al Qaeda guys? America spends 20 years kicking them out of Afghanistan, and the minute a Democrat president cuts and runs, there’s them jihadis, gettin’ all jihad-y again.
I mean, Joe Biden himself swore that al Qaeda wouldn’t be coming back after his precipitous, panicked rout. Yet, here’s ol’ Brandon, bragging about killing a top-level al Qaeda leader… in Afghanistan… where he wasn’t supposed to be.
In justifying the withdrawal from Kabul last year, Biden unconvincingly asserted that a new, over-the-horizon model of counter-terrorism would prevent the re-emergence of al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.
Narrator: It did not, in fact, prevent the re-emergence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Obviously enough, the strike that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri found him living openly with his family in downtown Kabul, in Sherpur district – a former diplomatic enclave just north of the former presidential palace – in a home owned by Mawli Hamza, chief of staff to Taliban foreign minister (and Pakistani protege) Sirajuddin Haqqani. Clearly the notion that al-Qa’ida would not re-establish itself in Afghanistan was fantasy.
More important, in eastern Afghanistan, in rural districts close to the Pakistan border, persistent reporting suggests al-Qa’ida bases and training camps are growing again as the organisation re-establishes itself in its old stomping ground. And this is to say nothing of Islamic State, enemy to both the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, whose leaders welcomed Zawahiri’s death even as they continue to exploit Taliban weakness to build their own Afghan safe haven. And they have their choice of billions of dollars of military equipment abandoned by the US during last year’s chaos.
So, what did 20 years of war actually achieve? What did we get in return for trillions of dollars poured into the military-industrial complex, and the blood of thousands of young Americans, Britons and Australians?
Well, it looks like we taught the jihadis to be a lot smarter than the Masters of War in Washington.
Zawahiri was symbolically important but operationally the 71-year-old was a figurehead. The old man’s terrorist career began four decades ago with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He had long since ceased to plan or conduct operations, and a new generation of al-Qa’ida leaders had risen to prominence.
The jihadis may be many things, but stupid or unadaptable aren’t two of them.
Strategically, then, even as the US knocks out the last of the al-Qa’ida old guard, the organisation and the threat have moved on. At the grand-strategic level, the forever wars launched after 9/11 have done little to reduce the danger they were designed to address.
Rather, the war on terror spread the terrorist threat worldwide, created larger, newer and more radical groups, destabilised entire societies making them more vulnerable to terrorist influence, and weakened the moral authority and military credibility of the US and its allies.
The Australian
But at least the paymasters of the Establishment cronies on both sides of the political aisle got even more obscenely rich.