US President Joe
Biden was not wrong when he declared that “justice has been served” with the
killing of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri in a US drone strike.
اضافة اعلان
The problem is
that this is only half of the truth; the other half is that Zawahiri was more a
has-been than a power to be reckoned with on the terrorist totem pole. In
death, he may have scored his most significant achievement since becoming head
of Al-Qaeda as the symbol of the failure of decades of war in Afghanistan.
Zawahiri’s
presence in Kabul in a house owned by Sirajuddin Haqqani, Afghanistan’s de facto deputy head of state, will be touted as
evidence that Afghanistan has reverted to being a base for terrorist groups.
Haqqani’s son and son-in-law are believed to have also died in the drone
strike.
In addition, the
killing will likely become a partisan issue in domestic US politics, with
Republicans pointing to Biden’s bungled withdrawal a year ago of US troops from
Afghanistan.
In anticipation
of the criticism, Biden said the killing demonstrated the US’ post-withdrawal
ability to protect Americans without “thousands of boots on the ground”.
Even so, the
withdrawal resulted from a war that the US and its allies could not win and a
fundamentally flawed US-Taliban agreement negotiated by the administration of
former president Donald Trump that helped the Taliban regain power.
Since succeeding
Osama bin Laden after the US killed him in 2011, Zawahiri, the man who helped
shape Al-Qaeda from day one, could not garner the stature of the group’s former
leader. Nor was he able to impose his will on Al-Qaeda franchises in Yemen,
Somalia, and elsewhere in Africa.
Researcher Nelly
Lahoud argues in a recently published book based on computer files confiscated
in the US raid that killed bin Laden that Al-Qaeda had lost much of its
operational capability in the immediate years after the 2001 invasion of
Afghanistan.
Daesh, the
foremost terrorist organization locked in a bitter fight with the Taliban,
increasingly overshadowed Al-Qaeda, showcasing Zawahiri’s inability to fill bin
Laden’s shoes.
In fact, Daesh
today poses a greater threat to the US than Al-Qaeda. Equally importantly,
Daesh also constitutes a more significant threat to Central Asian states like
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as Russia and China.
If Zawahiri’s
presence in Kabul raises questions about the Taliban’s willingness and
determination to prevent militant groups from operating from its territory,
repeated Daesh attacks on domestic Afghan targets, and the firing of rockets
into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan call into question the group’s ability to do so.
To be sure,
granting Al-Qaeda leaders shelter does not by definition amount to Taliban
acquiescence of the group launching attacks from Afghan soil.
The questions
are particularly acute given that Zawahiri was killed days after the Taliban
engaged with representatives of 30 countries at a conference in the Uzbek
capital of Tashkent in a bid to unfreeze some $7 billion in Afghan foreign
currency reserves.
Days later,
Tashkent hosted foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO),
who had Afghanistan high on their agenda. The SCO groups India, Russia, China,
Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
The Taliban
regime has yet to be officially recognized by any country. Countries across
geopolitical divides have insisted that the Taliban first demonstrate their
willingness and ability to control all of Afghanistan and curtail militant
groups.
The
international community also required the Taliban to form an inclusive
government and ensure women’s rights. The Taliban have yet to deliver on any of
its promises.
… Daesh today poses a greater threat to the US than Al-Qaeda. Equally importantly, Daesh also constitutes a more significant threat to Central Asian states like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as Russia and China.
Reporting to the
UN Security Council in January, UN Special Representative for Afghanistan
Deborah Lyons noted that “the existence of numerous terrorist groups in
Afghanistan remains a broad international and especially regional concern. The
desire of the de facto authorities to take on this threat across the board
remains to be convincingly demonstrated”.
Lyons’ remarks
have seemingly gone unheeded in Kabul. In response to Daesh attacks on
Tajikistan, home to Russia’s largest foreign military base, the Taliban are
building a watchtower on the two countries’ border with the help of a Tajik
group bent on changing the regime in Dushanbe.
Adding insult to
injury, graffiti near the tower celebrates Muhammad Sharipov, aka M. Arsalon or
Mahdi Arsalon, a Tajik national wanted by authorities for the past eight years
on terrorism charges.
During talks
last month, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon cautioned his Russian counterpart,
Vladimir Putin, against a possible recognition by Moscow of the Taliban regime.
Putin insisted that he would consider Tajik concerns about ethnic minority
rights in Afghanistan.
While ethnic
minority rights may be a Tajik concern, the opposite may be true for China.
China fears that the militant Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), also known as the
East Turkestan Islamic Movement, hardened by the war in Syria, may want to use
Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacks in retaliation for China’s brutal
crackdown on the Uyghur Turkic Muslim minority in the northwestern province of
Xinjiang.
A UN Security
Council report said last month that the
group had built strongholds in Badakhshan near the Chinese border in
northeast Afghanistan, where it had “expanded its area of operations and
covertly purchased weapons, with the aim of improving its capabilities for
terrorist activities”.
The Taliban
suggested that they had moved the estimated 1,000 Uyghur fighters away from the
Chinese border to other parts of Afghanistan last October. China has long
pressed the Taliban to curtail the group’s activity.
Creating
distance between Uyghur militants and the Chinese border may not be good
enough. Daesh sought to make that clear when it employed a Uyghur as a suicide bomber
in an attack last October on a Shiite Muslim mosque in the Afghan city of
Kunduz.
The message was:
Uyghur militants have alternatives. The Taliban may not be their best bet.
James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar,
an adjunct senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and
blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
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