The Killing of Al-Zawahiri (Updated)

As you are presumably aware yesterday the arch-terrorist and notional commander of Al Qaeda was killed by drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I don’t intend to dwell on this subject and, while I do not dispute that he deserved killing, I suspect my views are out of the mainstream. I will air them here.

First, I think that the killing has almost no strategic significance. I thought the same about Bin Laden’s killing and I think my views have largely been borne out. Any notion of a cohesive “Islamist terrorism” is misconceived. I think that terrorism is endemic in Islam as it is in any sola scriptura confession without a magisterium in which the sacred book can be interpreted as condoning violence against non-believers. It’s impossible to prove a negative but I doubt that a single terrorism incident was deterred by Bin Laden’s killing and Al-Zawahiri’s killing will have less significance if anything.

I question the authority under which President Biden authorized the extrajudicial killing. Presumably, the Authorization to Use Military Force. That is getting pretty hoary at this point. I thought it should have been repealed by this time. Under the rule of law there really should be more process and oversight.

And I question the prudence of extrajudicial killings more generally. Should we condone the assassination of, say, Speaker Pelosi by the Chinese? I don’t think so.

Update

At Atlantic vis MSN Graeme Wood expands on some of the same thoughts I expressed above:

Zawahiri’s replacement will be younger and more energetic than the old doctor. I wish that younger man a short and skittish life. But the truth is that Zawahiri’s killing probably will not have much effect on global terrorism, because the younger jihadist generation has already ceased to regard him as a leader, spiritual or otherwise. Zawahiri’s crowning achievement, the September 11 attacks, was ultimately a one-off, and its plotters spent most of the rest of their lives on the run, or bored senseless in Guantánamo Bay. The jihadist movement that achieved something new was the Islamic State—which ridiculed Zawahiri, called him a goofball and a geezer, and set out on a path of wanton destruction against his orders. It mocked him for his deference to the Taliban and for swearing allegiance to its founder, Mullah Omar, who turned out to have been dead for years. Many of the possible successors to Zawahiri have already split off into other jihadist groups, and have long been trying to bring about carnage and a terrestrial paradise without al-Qaeda’s consent. They certainly will not seek the consent of his successor.

More interesting, I suspect, will be the attitude of the Taliban. They thought they had a country of their own, and that they would be left alone to rebuild it. They want money, and they want food for their starving people. But their critics have said that they are little more than terrorists themselves, and that anyone who claims they have softened in the past 20 years has been taken in.

If the Taliban did, indeed, promise the Biden Administration they would not play host to Al Qaeda, as has been claimed, they should pay a price for it. And at the least the Biden Administration has demonstrated that we are capable of doing that.