Ejaz Haider

Zawahiri’s assassination and forever war

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, long in hiding, was assassinated by a targeted drone strike in Kabul on the morning of July 31. Predictably, there has been a flurry of media reports and analyses about the strike.

Views depend on which of the following three issues one chooses to emphasise: (1) counterterrorism capabilities, especially over-the-horizon capabilities; (2) continued intelligence work which makes CT ops possible and successful; and, (3) the use of advanced technical means to execute operations.

It is a matter of record — discussed at length by Steve Coll and others — that Biden, as Vice President, consistently opposed counterinsurgency plans that cast the net wide and brought into their ambit the training and equipping of Afghan National Security Forces, funding for Afghan civil society and continued budgetary support for post-invasion Afghan governments.

With the US troops gone from Afghanistan, Biden has both the reason and the space to focus on over-the-horizon CT ops. The strike that took out al-Zawahiri is a classic example of such an operation. It also dovetails with Biden’s domestic political compulsions besides getting majority support from the Beltway policy wonks. You find terrorists, you hell-fire them. Period.

If one narrows the focus to high-grade intelligence work and the employment of advanced technical means to track, locate, identify and execute al-Zawahiri, the US does get full marks. Add to that some indication that the operation might have had ground support — in other words that the US had assets on the ground in a hostile city — and the strike comes across as even more daring.

Purely tactically and operationally speaking, the operation was prepped and conducted flawlessly. The use of drones and their tactical/operational effectiveness is also borne by the analysis done by Nelly Lahoud in her The Bin Laden Papers, the trove of documents and computer files the US Navy SEALS took away after killing Bin Laden.

The drones were effective; they greatly worried AQ cadres. But there are murkier worlds beyond the tactical, and the operational brilliance of the strike notwithstanding. And that’s where the larger picture comes in.

It is now beyond dispute that America’s Forever War has not delivered its politico-strategic objectives whether it be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria.

The Taliban are back in Afghanistan, as is Al-Qaeda. The ISK is not only operating in Afghanistan but mounting attacks in Pakistan. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the outlawed terrorist group, is based in Afghanistan and operating from there.

Iraq remains unstable and despite its oil wealth its economy is in poor shape and unemployment remains high. Its politics is divisive with many groups exercising almost parallel authority to the government, it doesn’t have a president and at the time of writing there’s an ongoing standoff between Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and rivals aligned with Iran.

Libya has been torn apart by two civil wars since the 2011 Arab spring. Foreign intervention has further fuelled the war, spawning a number of armed rival groups and resulting in a massive humanitarian crisis. It’s the same story with Syria.

This, then, is the legacy of direct US interventions as also indirect support for certain groups, using both Special Operations and over-the-horizon CT capabilities.

The question, therefore, is this: do the very impressive CT capabilities of the US actually address deeper problems beyond immediate tactical and operational successes?

The answer, again, by all accounts is no. As Spencer Ackerman wrote in his 2021 book, Reign of Terror: “A perpetual war,” Obama observed in May 2013, would “prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.” A great tragedy of Obama’s presidency is that this insight did not guide his actions.”

Ackerman goes on to say that “Even after [the] delusion died in Iraq, the fallback position among the politically powerful [in the US] was that extrication was more dangerous than quagmire. A circumscribed, managed quagmire could even ultimately comport with America’s broader hegemonic position of open-ended foreign deployments pursued in the name of…the ‘rules-based international order.’”

Ackerman is of course a fierce critic of America’s Forever War, not exactly in lockstep with how Beltway experts and America’s security establishment look at the US, its global role and its borderless wars. It is perhaps better to find someone from within the US hardcore establishment to see if the US has been able to achieve its politico-strategic objectives. Please welcome former US Army Lieutenant-General and former US National Security Advisor, Herbert Raymond McMaster.

McMaster wanted Trump to stay on in Afghanistan. So, one can criticise many of his assumptions regarding what the US could practically achieve in that country after the war had already been lost. As Ackerman says, “Few in the [US] military paused to reflect that the unlikelihood of the Taliban’s suing for peace discredited McMaster’s strategy of suppressing them until the elusive day when they would.”

Even so, speaking at The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum in 2014, McMaster made some trenchant observations about America’s neglect of the political and human dimensions of wars. He listed four fallacies: the Vampire fallacy; Zero Dark Thirty fallacy; the Mutual of Omaha fallacy and the RSVP fallacy.

The Vampire fallacy, according to McMaster, “is the belief that a narrow range of technological capabilities will deliver fast, cheap and efficient victory in future war(s)… The latest manifestation [is] the belief in new range of technological capabilities, everything from big data analytics to artificial intelligence to drones and robotics and so forth.” Like a vampire, “It is impossible to kill this fallacy…it re-emerges just about every decade.”

The Zero Dark Thirty fallacy, which refers to the 2012 film about tracking and eliminating Bin Laden, is also like the vampire fallacy. “It elevates an important military capability, raiding, to the level of a defence strategy. The US capability to conduct raids against networked terrorist organisations is portrayed as a substitute for rather than a complement to conventional Joint Force capabilities.” This is a reference to thousands of night raids conducted by US Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As McMaster put it to Allison Schrager at Quartz, “The problem with both these fallacies is [that] they represent important capabilities you need to have, but these are masquerade[d] as strategies and simple solutions to the complex problem of war, neglecting war’s political nature…war’s human nature… [and its] uncertainty based on the interactive nature, and finally neglecting that it is ultimately a contest of wills.”

The Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom fallacy refers to two television shows in the US in the 60s. “Under the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom fallacy, the US … relies on proxy forces … to do the fighting on land. While it is hard to imagine future operations that will not require US forces to operate with multiple partners, primary reliance on proxies is often problematic due to issues involving capability as well as willingness to act consistent with US interests.”

Finally, the RSVP fallacy: “Thank you for the kind invitation to the war but the United States regrets it is unable to attend.” As he told Schrager, “This is the belief that you can just opt out of war, it’s a narcissistic approach to war [in] which we define…war [only] in relation to us and what we’d like to do.”

As the reader can see, McMaster is not directly challenging the very idea of America’s Forever War. He is also not interested in the probity of US decisions to go to war, Jus ad bellum. When he speaks of the Vampire and Zero Dark Thirty fallacies, he is not challenging the human misery caused by such raids in Iraq and Afghanistan or the legality of targeted and signature drone strikes. Instead, he is noting how such capabilities cannot be a substitute for the complexity that inheres in war. But his diagnosis, from a purely operational lens, is quite instructive.

Which brings us back to al-Zawahiri’s targeted assassination: will it degrade AQ (which now has franchises in various parts of the globe); will the killing itself solve the problem of ‘terrorism’ as conceived by the US? As Ackerman wrote on Aug 1, a day after al-Zawahiri’s killing: “Without the objective of ending the War on Terror, the administration [has] struggled, as have its three predecessors, to explain just what killing people like Zawahiri accomplishes.”

That’s an important question, not so much about the need to eliminate al-Zawahiri, who might have been betrayed by some Taliban faction, but more about whether such targeted assassinations would achieve the broader objective of bringing the Forever War to an end.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies