Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Afghanistan, still bad news for the US

The skill behind al-Zawahiri’s assassination illustrates the failure of Biden’s ‘over the horizon’

Kudos to President Joe Biden for taking out arch terrorist, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and for doing so without the loss of civilian life.

Zawahiri was the hands on architect of 9/11 and countless other terror attacks. He wasn’t just past tense. Up until his death he was the conciliator among up to 30 terrorist factions. He was pitch-perfect evil and a poster boy for the distortion of religious passion.

Biden was demanding of his staff that the drone attack that took Zawahiri out not entail “collateral damage.” Biden would not give his approval until all possible measures to limit the strike to Zawahiri were taken.

This careful, conscientious, moral exactitude paradoxically highlights the continuing American failure in Afghanistan. Recall: The agreement under which Biden undertook his calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago forbade the Taliban from hosting al-Qaida personnel, let alone its leader. The Taliban violated this agreement. Biden’s “over the horizon” strategy was supposed to deter any such violation and, failing that, was supposed to counter it.

“Over the horizon,” to this administration, means: drones = human intelligence. “Over the horizon” means the US can successfully pursue the same strategy from the air that it could pursue both from the air and on the ground. As we say, it’s a paradox, but the strike against al-Zawahiri verifies that drones cannot replace human intelligence.

How so?

The effort that went into his demise demanded a level of effort, expertise, manpower and focus that could never be brought to bear on an entire terrorist group. And if Zawahiri’s demise proves anything, it is that the Taliban is perfectly OK hosting al-Qaida. As Bruce Ridel of the Brookings Institution, who conducted a review of Afghanistan policy for President Obama, told The New York Times: “Twenty years of effort were wasted.”

Richard Miniter writes in the Wall Street Journal:“Zawahiri’s relatives were tracked in Kabul as early as April, and the home where he was holed up was monitored for months. Intelligence analysts scrutinized the household movement to find the times when he was likely to be alone. Officials presented a scale-model of the home to President Biden and assured him that a potential strike wouldn’t bring down neighborhood buildings or harm noncombatants. The president insisted on careful planning precisely to avoid civilian harm. It wasn’t a rash decision, but a calibrated and sober one.”

This is how to take out an individual terrorist. It is not how to take out a terrorist group. This is how the process is drastically elongated with an exclusively “over the horizon” policy. This is not the basis of a counterterrorism strategy against a terrorist organization. This is not how Israel counters Hamas. This is a one off.

When President Biden recklessly pulled out of Afghanistan last year, he said: “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaida gone? We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaida in Afghanistan as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.”

This ranks right up there with George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, in 2004. Not only was the worldwide leader of al-Qaida welcomed in Afghanistan, he was put up in the capital’s most prestigious neighborhood, where American diplomats lived up until just a little over a year ago. If Biden is right that with al-Qaida gone from Afghanistan, the US has no interest there; then now, with al-Qaida back, the US has distinct interests there.

Alas, Biden’s reckless handover of the country to the Taliban on a silver platter renders it difficult if not impossible to reengage in Afghanistan on the scale of the extremely small American force that held it in check before we withdrew. The consequences of that error may haunt us for years to come, as the massive effort it took to assassinate a single al-Qaida terrorist demonstrates.

Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News




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