Clifford D. May
Just under a year ago, President Biden asked, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone?”
Just over a week ago, he provided an answer. On his order, two missiles from a Hellfire drone targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri, the 71-year-old emir of al Qaeda, who was taking his morning tea on the balcony of a well-appointed home in an exclusive Kabul neighborhood.
Al-Zawahiri had come in from the cold, as it were. He’d been hiding out in remote locations since 2011 when SEAL Team Six killed Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s founder and first leader. Despite the isolation, he achieved goals: Al-Qaeda today controls more territory than ever, with branches in the Indo-Pacific, Middle East and Africa.
After last August’s shambolic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s subsequent takeover, he had evidently come to believe he could return to the capital to work in comfort and safety. It was a fatal mistake.
The house in which al-Zawahiri resided is owed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, one of two Taliban deputy emirs. In February of 2020, The New York Times gave him space for an op-ed (without, by the way, sparking fury from the paper’s staff as occurred when Sen. Tom Cotton was afforded the same privilege) in which he asserted: “Reports about foreign groups in Afghanistan are politically motivated exaggerations by the warmongering players on all sides of the war.”
Taliban negotiators later promised not to cooperate with al Qaeda or other groups “threatening the security of the United States and its allies.” Former President Donald Trump and Mr. Biden apparently believed them. That, too, was a fatal mistake.
Eliminating terrorist leaders is useful. But those waging what they regard as a 1,400-year-old jihad against infidels, heretics and apostates tend to be tenacious. The phrase “forever war” doesn’t daunt them. It inspires them.
The rulers of China and Russia also are waging a kind of war against the West. Neo-isolationists — they prefer to be called “restrainers” — will argue that we can’t deal with all these threats simultaneously. But to survive in the jungle, you must defend yourself, not just against lions. The crocodiles can eat you, too.
Israelis have come to terms with this reality. Iran’s rulers threaten them with genocide, as does Hezbollah, Tehran’s Lebanon-based proxy. Against these and other enemies, Israelis fight both wars and “wars between wars.”
They’ve tried other approaches. In 2005, they withdrew from Gaza, which they’d seized from Egypt in the defensive war of 1967. Their hope was that Palestinians would transform the territory into Dubai on the Mediterranean. Instead, Hamas waged a civil war against the Palestinian Authority, decisively taking power in 2007.
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