EER Editorials
European Eye on Radicalization, Aug. 10, 2022
“… the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) focused huge resources on finding Zawahiri, and then it took months to plan the strike.”
United States President Joe Biden announced on 1 August that Al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had been killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, on 30 July. A year ago, in August 2021, a consortium of jihadists led by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda that answers to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency overthrew the Afghan government and re-established an Islamist regime. Some had believed that the Taliban would contain Al-Qaeda; this was always fanciful, and the discovery of Al-Qaeda’s emir in the Taliban capital only underlines how intertwined these two organisations are. Al-Qaeda once again controlling a state, and who is chosen as Zawahiri’s successor, have major implications for global security.
Zawahiri’s Jihadist Rise
Zawahiri was born in Egypt in 1951 to a comfortable middle-class family, and joined an Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, when he was 14. Zawahiri went on to join and then to lead Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which he merged with Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda in the months before 9/11. Zawahiri has old connections with the Islamic Republic of Iran; he was one of their favourites Sunni militants after the 1979 Revolution. It was through Zawahiri, while in Sudan in the early 1990s, who helped Bin Laden forge a relationship with the Iranian government, that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), specifically its Lebanese branch, Hezbollah, could provide training for Al-Qaeda. The Iran connection would become ever-more important during Zawahiri’s leadership of Al-Qaeda after Bin Laden was killed in 2011.
Zawahiri’s time as emir of Al-Qaeda has been a turbulent one in the jihadist world: he was the man on the spot to respond to the “Arab spring”, managing the regional affiliates—Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and Al-Shabaab in Somalia—as the countries in which they were based were rocked with popular unrest, and managing internal rebellion as Al-Qaeda’s former Iraqi affiliate, the group we now know as the Islamic State, went rogue and tried to displace its mother organization as the leader of the jihadist movement.
Zawahiri has often been mocked for being such an uninspiring leader, with his output consisting of lengthy—indeed, interminable—finger-wagging monologues, but it has to be said that he weathered the Islamic State challenge, preventing major defections of affiliates, and held the line ideologically: as the Islamic State tried to form its “caliphate”—the ultimate stated goal of Al-Qaeda—and launched a massive terrorist wave against the “infidel” West, Zawahiri refused to compete on their terrain, saying a caliphate could not be imposed immediately from above, that the jihadists had to build a “popular base” (al-hadina al-shabiyya) locally first, and that the attacks in the West would only bring about retribution that destroyed everything the jihadists managed to build. At this stage, Zawahiri looks to have had the better of the argument.
Al-Qaeda Has a State Again
One of the important aspects of Zawahiri being killed in the upscale Sherpur neighborhood of Kabul is that the safehouse belonged to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the so-called Haqqani Network, a member of Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban’s overall deputy. This highlights again the fluid nature of the jihadist network in Afghanistan, with the distinctions between the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the Haqqanis being more theoretical than real. Wherever the Taliban goes, Al-Qaeda will be present, including in its capital. This is a return to the pre-9/11 situation, where Al-Qaeda has the space of a state to set up training camps and other infrastructure to plot its operations.
A secondary aspect is that it has to be concluded that if the Haqqani Network, which is fully controlled by Pakistan’s ISI, knew where Zawahiri was, then so did the ISI. This is a replay in many ways of Osama bin Laden’s discovery a few minutes’ drive from Pakistan’s main military academy in Abbottabad in 2011. The U.S. Clearly feared the possibility that Pakistan would tip-off Zawahiri and so refused to share any intelligence about the strike before it was carried out.
Counterterrorism Operations Cannot Be Sustained
When Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, he said that the U.S. strategy would be “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism; that is, using bases in neighboring states—or even in the Gulf—to conduct kinetic actions against terrorist targets that threaten the U.S. or its allies. It was reported at the time that “members of the intelligence community label it, derisively, the ‘over-the-rainbow’ strategy”. The President and his supporters are claiming Zawahiri’s death as vindication, and, with the one-year anniversary of the disastrous withdrawal approaching, this is a Handy narrative to push back against the negative media coverage: Afghanistan might be in a terrible state, they will say, with a collapsed economy and living under a brutal theocracy, but at least threats to America are under control. This is misleading.
The information available suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) focused huge resources on finding Zawahiri, and then it took months to plan the strike. Even if this process could be streamlined for less politically sensitive targets, this is still a lot of work—and a very slow process—to get to a single individual. Moreover, the type of intelligence-gathering to eliminate one “high-value” target is quite different from the intelligence capability required to give the CIA an in-depth view of the terrorist networks and their intentions, which is what would be needed to conduct a sustained counterterrorism campaign that could keep Al-Qaeda and its allies in check. There is no indication the CIA has this kind of big picture visibility in Afghanistan. …
