What after the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri?

When on February 29, 2020 the administration headed by the then US President Donald Trump signed a peace agreement with the Taliban at a ceremony held in Doha, the capital of Qatar, the US team led by Zalmay Khalilzad made a number of assumptions. Among the four, the most important was that the Taliban was committed to reduce the level of violence in Afghanistan. The insurgent group would not seek to gain ground in the battle it was waging against the government troops, which were aided by the US. The Taliban would not provide safe havens to any terrorist group that was involved in carrying out operations against targets outside the country’s borders. And, ultimately following some concessions made by President Ashraf Ghani who had by then governed the country for more than six years, the Taliban would seek to become partners in governing Afghanistan. None of these expectations were met.

A year and a half later, when Ashraf Ghani fled from Kabul after the US had decided to pull out of the country, the Taliban lost no time in moving into the presidential palace. That was on August 15, 2021, after Ghani had given up all hope of bringing both peace and democracy to the country he had then led. With the Taliban now in total command, the US and its allies decided to punish the new government by stopping the flow of assistance to the country and impounding the official deposits held by Kabul in the Federal Reserve Bank in the US. The commercial banking system followed, and the Afghans were now without financial resources to buy food and healthcare for the increasingly desperate population. The UN has estimated that more than half of the population faced early death because of food shortages and the absence of health facilities. Children were likely to suffer the most.

As a part of the sudden pullout of troops from Afghanistan, President Biden pledged that he would keep a close watch on Afghanistan. He promised to mount what he described as “over the horizon” counterterrorism operations to check Afghanistan from becoming a source of international terrorism once again. That Washington had the ability to do that was demonstrated on August 2, 2022, when it launched an attack on an apartment in which Ayman al-Zawahiri had lived for a while. The building he and his family occupied was located in the center of Kabul. Other members of his family were not hurt although they were located in the house Zawahiri had occupied. This was the first known counter-terrorism operation carried out by the US after it pulled out its troops.

 “After carefully considering clear and convincing evidence of Zawahiri’s location, I ordered an operation that would remove him from the battlefield once and for all,” said Biden in a short address to his nation and the world from the White House. “I made a promise to the American people that we would continue to conduct effective counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond. We’ve done just that.” It is the use of the phrase ‘and beyond’ that should worry countries such as Pakistan located in sensitive parts of the world.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who had turned to Islamic radicalism while he was still a student, became Al-Qaeda’s supreme leader. He had been influenced by Sayyid Qutub, an Egyptian intellectual who had spent some time in the US and while in that country was convinced that the US was the greatest threat to Islam. Qutub saw the world diametrically divided between believers and infidels. He included moderate Muslims among the infidels. Qutub was imprisoned and tortured in Egypt, and then hanged there in 1966. “In al-Zawahiri’s eyes, Sayyid Qutub’s words struck young Muslims more deeply than those of his contemporaries because his words eventually led to his execution,” wrote Montasser al-Zayat in his widely read 2004 book The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden’s Right Hand Man. Would al-Zawahiri’s killing like that of Qutub before him, also result in attracting a new set of followers? Only time will answer that question.

Zawahiri’s death at the hands of the Americans operating from outside Afghanistan drew praise from both Democratic and Republican leaders in the US. It might have further widened the divide between many followers of Islam and the West. “Our chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan opened the door for Al-Qaeda to operate freely inside and outside the country and to conduct external operations against the US and its allies once again,” said Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee. Washington’s Western allies also approved of the operation and its outcome. “Tough job professionally done by our US allies,” said Richard Moore, the head of the British MI6, the agency that does intelligence work for the country outside its borders.

He interpreted the US’s move as a “culmination of a long-shared effort since 9/11 to eliminate the threat posed by Zawahiri — a man responsible, with his toxic creed, for the death of many of those in the past three decades.” Intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic believed that it was al-Zawahiri who planned and executed a number of operations aimed to hurt America and Washington’s interests outside its borders. He is believed to have planned the October 2000 attack on the American warship USS Cole near Yemen that killed 17 US men in uniform. He was indicted by the US for the attacks on the country’s embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. He was also the architect of the September 11, 2001 attack on two high profile targets in the US that took nearly 3,000 lives, some of whom were not Americans.

The US State Department had offered a reward of $250 million for information leading to Zawahiri’s hereabouts. Before he moved to Kabul, he is believed to have moved around the generally lawless Pashtun tribal belts that run between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He probably believed that with the Taliban having established themselves in Kabul, and in control of most of the country, it would be safe for him to locate in the Afghan capital. However, the reach of the US’s intelligence services proved to be long and lethal.

There were reports in the American press that the country’s CIA was behind the operation that took Zawahiri’s life. It was a revenge killing for the suicide attack carried out in 2009 by a Jordanian physician, Humam al-Balawi, who, the Agency believed, had been recruited for providing inside information about the top leadership that had survived in Al-Qaeda. Once having gained CIA’s confidence, he was allowed into some of its highly secret operations including those carried out of its post in Khost, a town near the border with Pakistan. Once he had managed to gain admission into the base he blew himself by exploding a bomb he was carrying on his body along with a number of senior Agency officials. Al-Zawahiri’s killing was a sort of tit-for-tat response. However, this is not the end of the US’s ‘War on Terror’ — begun by former US President George W. Bush, who forced Pakistan to partner with Washington. Pakistan continues to pay a heavy price for that partnership. Would that continue to be paid? Once again, only time will provide the answer.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 8^th, 2022.

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