What Zawahiri’s Killing Means for al-Qaeda

Zawahiri was living in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the time of his death. What is the significance of that?
It is highly significant that he was residing in Kabul, presumably with the Taliban’s full knowledge. This demolishes the Taliban’s claims that they have severed ties with al-Qaeda, but rather confirms that the group is nothing other than an intimate partner and ally. Zawahiri wasn’t living in a cave near some remote village on the border with Pakistan, but in a mansion in a part of Kabul where Western diplomats lived. He was clearly a Taliban intimate and treated with great deference and respect. This will undermine the Taliban’s efforts to negotiate with the United States to unfreeze the $9 billion in assets that Washington is holding.

How much of a threat does al-Qaeda pose compared to other Islamist groups?
Al-Qaeda under Zawahiri was deliberately playing a long game, content to quietly rebuild and regroup while the world focused on defeating the self-declared Islamic State and destroying its caliphate. Zawahiri’s strategy was two-fold: one, to let the Islamic State absorb all the attention of the United States and its allies while al-Qaeda marshaled its strength to continue its three-decade-plus struggle; and two, to portray al-Qaeda as moderate extremists—a more reliable and less ephemeral force than the impetuous and hyper-violent Islamic State. Zawahiri’s quietist strategy was validated by the patience and perseverance that returned the Taliban to power. So, while the core al-Qaeda has been less active than other Islamist rivals or even its own franchises, but that doesn’t mean that it has eschewed terrorism or given up its struggle.

What does this strike say about the Biden administration’s counterterrorism approach?
Zawahiri stood on his balcony daily in broad daylight. The U.S. intelligence community had tracked the movement of his wife, daughters, and grandkids to the mansion in a tony part of Kabul. It then identified Zawahiri coming to join them. I am not implying that any of this intelligence work or the strike itself was easy, only that Zawahiri and his family were doing these things all in plain sight—that’s how secure he and the Taliban felt.

So, yes, Zawahiri’s death is tremendous news, but it is not yet proof positive of the effectiveness of Biden’s “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism strategy. It would be an intelligence success of a different magnitude if current U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan also effectively disrupted the planning and formulation of actual terrorist attacks. But the strike on Zawahiri does invalidate the claims of pundits who last week—on the CIA’s seventy-fifth anniversary—said it was a mistake for the CIA to focus so much on counterterrorism and high-value targeting after 9/11 and not enough on bread-and-butter intelligence collection. The CIA’s pivotal role in bin Laden’s Zawahiri’s deaths shows the strengths and peerless capabilities of the CIA and the broader intelligence community.

Bruce Hoffman is Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security. This article is published courtesy of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).