Bernat Armangue/AP Photo
An Afghan man inspects the damage to the Ahmadi family home in Kabul, Afghanistan, September 13, 2021, after a U.S. drone strike that killed ten civilians.
When the Biden administration prepared to share important news regarding a successful counterterrorism operation, many Afghanistan observers suspected that what seemed at first to be a minor event from the weekend might not be so minor after all. Initially, it was reported that a small missile had struck a building in Kabul. No casualties had been reported at first. But in due course, it was the Taliban themselves who took the next step. In a statement, the group’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, denounced an American drone strike that took place on Afghan soil. Mujahed stopped short of releasing any details; the statement did not name any specific victims and instead stuck to the predictable and general condemnation of Washington having again violated Afghan sovereignty.
Finally, as it was announced that Joe Biden was due to give a televised announcement to the world, news from anonymous sources in Washington spread that al-Qaeda’s leader, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been targeted and successfully killed by a CIA strike in the middle of Kabul. “After carefully considering the clear and convincing evidence of his location, I authorized a precision strike that would remove him from the battlefield once and for all,” Biden said a few moments later.
To what extent al-Zawahiri was actually in “the battlefield” is yet to be determined; the 71-year-old’s importance and role within transnational militant circles had been waning for years, and he had aged greatly. Much like the organization he had co-founded, he was a shadow of his former self. That, however, still did not diminish the significance of his death by drone.
Two decades after the start of the U.S.-led war on terror, al-Zawahiri has finally been killed—yet his assassination neither accomplished much nor gave any real cause for celebration. Similarly to his predecessor Osama bin Laden, who was killed by Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011, al-Zawahiri was not found languishing in a remote mountain cave or in a desert, but in a relatively affluent neighborhood in downtown Kabul. Sherpur, where al-Zawahiri was located, once constituted part of the capital’s green zone and during the American occupation was frequented by a widely detested coterie of diplomats, NGO workers, and warlords, or their offspring, who constituted the Afghan elite in those days. The last tenant of al-Zawahiri's residence was a close aide to former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who had fled the country together with Ghani almost a year ago as their government collapsed, thus paving the way for the Taliban’s triumphant return.
During the war and American occupation, it was overwhelmingly rural Afghanistan that suffered through the ceaseless bombardment by the United States and its allies. Afghan villages were portrayed continuously as havens of extremism and militancy and hideouts of infamous terrorists. Yet villains like Zawahiri never seemed to be present or harmed when the world’s most powerful military alliance launched countless barrages of bombardments on weddings or funerals in the countryside, far from the gaze or the concern of foreign embassies and international media centered in Kabul. Al-Zawahiri himself was part of a long list of high-value targets who were declared dead multiple times after poorly named “precision strikes,” only to resurface in subsequent videos and announcements. Another person on the hit list was al-Zawahiri’s alleged host in Kabul, Sirajuddin Haqqani, a well-known Taliban leader and Afghanistan’s current interior minister. Al-Zawahiri and Haqqani alike became akin to ghosts, routinely reappearing alive and healthy after being declared killed in some bombing or another. Few cared to ask the obvious question: Who had actually been killed?
Ultimately, it remains an inconvenient truth that the strike against al-Zawahiri is a clear violation of international law and well-established human rights standards.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama also reacted to the strike against the al-Qaeda leader. “Tonight’s news is also proof that it’s possible to root out terrorism without being at war in Afghanistan,” Obama wrote on Twitter. The irony is grim indeed; it was Obama who dramatically escalated the war in Afghanistan during his time in office, turning it into a charnel house to no effect whatsoever. Obama also widened America’s clandestine wars across the world, primarily through drone strikes and shadowy elite forces, setting an example in relegating international law to little more than obscure words. In 2014, the British human rights organization Reprieve highlighted the fact that between 2002 and 2014, the manhunt against 41 targets in Yemen and Pakistan, including Haqqani and al-Zawahiri, resulted in the killing of at least 1,147 people.
Instead of grappling with the brutal side effects of his drone war, Obama prefered to make jokes about drones striking boys who dated his daughters. (It’s worth noting in this context that despite Biden’s unilateral assassination of al-Zawahiri, this is the first American drone strike since the withdrawal a year ago.)
Ultimately, it remains an inconvenient truth that the strike against al-Zawahiri is a clear violation of international law and well-established human rights standards that Western capitals routinely invoke to justify their misadventures abroad. According to Western norms, everyone deserves a fair trial outside of a war. Al-Zawahiri’s death in a calm city neighborhood, reportedly standing on a balcony, reveals the knee-jerk hysteria behind the phrase “war on terror.”
While Biden has considerably scaled back the various anti-terror wars, he plainly still believes that America has the right to kill anyone it deems a threat, anywhere, at any time, regardless of whether capture or extradition might be feasible. Authoritarian states all around the world have taken notice. Whether Turkish drone strikes against Kurdish civilians, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Saudi Arabia’s assassination of a Washington Post columnist, or China’s industrial-scale crackdown on the Muslim Uyghur minority, the war on terror’s brutal hypocrisies have proved to be a great enabler of brutality around the world.
At the moment, we still have to find out if everything we’ve heard so far is true. Although it’s unlikely that Biden would hold a press conference without absolute proof, it would be far from the first time that premature success was declared, or reports of zero civilian casualties turned out to be mistaken.
Although the Taliban has so far remained silent on the news from Washington, it is obvious that the group is in deep trouble. Apart from the fact that the Taliban possibly violated the Doha Agreement, which was signed between them and the Americans in 2020, some reports hint that al-Zawahiri was housed by Sirajuddin Haqqani. Compared to other Taliban factions, the Haqqanis always had close ties to global jihadists. It appears now that they, or at least parts of them, did not cut these ties and have thus thrown their group into a deep crisis. It is doubtful that the CIA could operate in Kabul again without any local help. There are even rumors about treason within the Taliban.
Average Afghans are once again left in the lurch. The Americans proved that they never left Afghanistan, and they could still do whatever they want at the push of a button, leaving Afghans with no recourse. This also happened during the final days of the U.S. withdrawal one year ago when another drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians. The remaining family members still wait for justice, like thousands of other Afghans who were terrorized from the sky over the previous 20 years.
Meanwhile, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction recently released a report finding, among other things, that 92 percent of Afghans are food-insecure and three million Afghan children face possible acute malnutrition. This is thanks largely to the combination of America withdrawing its occupation funds and its sanctions against the Taliban, which have been slightly loosened to prevent outright famine, but not by much. One would think that if the U.S. wanted to prevent future terror attacks, not starving children by the millions would get equal priority with bombing elderly terrorists.
