President Joe Biden ordering the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, the government’s most wanted man, last weekend in a downtown Kabul drone strike almost one year after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan has restarted the debate over the 20-year war’s end.
As critics complain Biden has been weak abroad, the demonstration of strength as commander in chief coincides with expected first-anniversary scrutiny of the U.S. military and intelligence capabilities in Afghanistan without having troops present.
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Biden and White House aides have underscored the success of “over the horizon” intelligence collection and operationalization in the precision strike that killed Zawahiri, referring to Islamic State chief Maher al Agal’s death last month in Syria as another case study.
But Emily Harding, deputy director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s International Security Program, advised Biden and his staff against making premature assessments since successful counterterrorism is typically measured by no terrorist attacks, either through deterrence or disruption.
“Part of disruption is leadership strikes, to be sure,” she told the Washington Examiner. “But one strike does not mean the threat is ended or that we have visibility into all threats coming out of Afghanistan.”
A senior administration official detailed late Monday the four-month operation to kill Zawahiri, a 71-year-old Egyptian described as Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 deputy and eventual successor. The CIA launched two deadly Hellfire missiles at his house’s balcony in a wealthy Kabul neighborhood, without civilian casualties, including Zawahiri’s family, according to the official. Haqqani Taliban were aware Zawahiri was in the house, the source said.
Harding praised the strike but conceded that Zawahiri’s “arrival in Kabul would have been hard to keep secret.”
“Plus, while intelligence collection anywhere in Afghanistan is hard, it is comparatively easy in the capital, where the U.S. had its most robust network and perhaps even still has access to some sympathetic Afghans who would like to see the Taliban fall,” she said.
Katherine Zimmerman, an American Enterprise Institute foreign and defense policy fellow, agreed that “episodic targeting” of terrorists in Afghanistan is unlikely to stop the Taliban from breaking the Doha peace agreements with the U.S. by harboring terrorists. She also questioned whether the “resource-intensive” months spent planning the strike is a “truly sustainable” model should other threats emerge.
For Zimmerman, although the Taliban “clearly” provided sanctuary to Zawahiri and despite al Qaeda’s best efforts to mask his presence, he left “a trail” for the U.S. to follow: a series of propaganda videos. But those recordings had repercussions, too.
“Relieved from counterterrorism pressure, Zawahiri was better able to communicate with his followers,” she said. “He released a significant number of statements in the past year compared to when he was fully in hiding.”
But while “over the horizon” strategies are preferable due to the lower risk of U.S. fatalities, Harding emphasized the importance of being “honest about the potential downside consequences” and needing to “know what we don’t know.”
“Biden should rightfully point to this strike as a win for the intelligence community and for the entire U.S., and it will likely mitigate some of the ‘one year later’ pieces that otherwise would have been truly dismal,” she said. “The bigger story is still bleak: Zawahiri’s death is a bright spot in what is otherwise a vast darkness of solemn developments, in particular for the female half of Afghanistan’s population.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby defended the country’s “robust” Middle East over-the-horizon capacity during a Tuesday press briefing.
“There’s not a scrap of the Earth that the United States can’t touch if we need to,” he said. “And the process of improvement doesn’t have shelf life. There’s no deadline.”
Biden, who cautioned former President Barack Obama on the military and political ramifications of the 2011 raid in Pakistan that killed bin Laden, mentioned his Afghanistan drawdown during his Zawahiri national address Monday night. That chaos, including the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, has been cited as the start of Biden’s declining popularity at home.
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“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond,” Biden said from the White House Blue Room balcony because of his COVID-19 infection. “We’ve done just that.”
The administration has not announced how it intends to commemorate the anniversary of the end of the $2 trillion Afghanistan war on Aug. 31.
