The US drone strike that killed Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the head of Al-Qaeda and one of the last architects left from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, gave a measure of justice. That does not provide a resolution in the debate that still surrounds the US counterterrorism policy.
For US President Joe Biden, strikes show the US can still target bad people even after controversial withdrawals from Afghanistan. For the critics, this shows that the withdrawal of the US allowed Al-Qaeda’s leadership to live in Kabul. There are some truths for both arguments.
But this strike is best seen as evidence of the creation of a human hunter machine without parallel in human history-which has become more difficult to maintain when Washington switches to things other than the counselorism.
From what has been revealed publicly, the Zawahiri operation is not a small appointment. Biden is very involved with this problem for weeks. The strike must have involved the extent of surveillance and reconnaissance assets to find Zawahiri, map the “life patterns” and identify the options to kill him without killing innocent people.
The strike itself requires unfriendly airspace, maybe from the base in the Gulf of Persia or maybe Central Asia. After the attack, US intelligence operations in the field in Kabul reportedly confirmed Zawahiri’s death.
This investment is no doubt justified, if only to show, as Biden said, that “no matter how long, wherever you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and bring you out. “The operation, as killed Osama bin Laden, 11 years ago, is also a window to a formidable ability developed by the US to find and neutralize enemies in several places that can be accessed on earth.
After 9/11, the Pentagon greatly expanded the Special Operations Forces, skilled in killing or arresting terrorist leaders and disturbing the network they rely on. The intelligence community uses human assets and technology, along with partnerships with countries that are friendly and not so friendly, to track extremist.
The US created a drone fleet that is commonly reached to Pakistan, Yemen, and other unfriendly areas; It develops weapons, like missiles that get Zawahiri, which can kill targets with very small guarantee damage. Base network, large and small, in larger West Asia and so on provides logistics traces for this activity.
The results can be very impressive. Sooner or later, the most prominent jihadists in the world-Bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi, Anwar Al-Awlaki and others-are, using the preferred euphemism, “Taken from the battlefield.” The deadly strike eliminates many bomb makers, facilitators, and planners, often forcing those who keep concentrating to keep them alive.
The capacity for this targeted murder becomes more important when the US goal shifts from changing a larger community in West Asia to only hit extremist organizations so that they cannot easily operate. Criticism that Washington only played with WHAC-A-mole, progress towards the tactical goals of the degrading terror groups that were translated into progress towards strategic objectives to prevent attacks on US homeland.
But human hunters on this scale are very expensive: often need to pay millions of dollars-and sometimes a lot of multiples of it-to track certain mines. This investment gradually becomes a barrier when other urgent geopolitical priorities arise.
In 2018, Gina Haspel, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, announced that her organization was spinning away from the counselor and towards competition with China and Russia. The US Department of Defense and Special Operations forces made similar changes.
Each of the last three US presidents tried to reduce the resources and attention devoured by counselorism. Finally, the withdrawal from Afghanistan forced Washington to part with some military presence that gave ready access to extremis, even though US troops remained in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and other danger places.
Zawahiri’s strike is not the end of the US struggle with terrorism, at least because the threat remains, from Afghanistan to Africa. But that might be more awards for the previous era than now.
Successful missions reveal a lot about the tools developed by the US to make war against terrorism in the period after 9/11. What he expressed about the efficacy of the Controlism policy in competitive priority moments and fewer resources are more difficult to say.
