Afghanistan mystery: Why was Al Qaeda’s leader in Kabul?

Announcing the death of Ayman al-Zawahri – killed by a CIA drone strike on the balcony of a villa in downtown Kabul early Sunday – President Joe Biden said it demonstrated a U.S. capability to fight terrorism in Afghanistan today, even without thousands of soldiers on the ground.

Yet a year after the jihadist Taliban swept back to power in Kabul, the brazen presence in the capital of the Egyptian-born Al Qaeda leader – a key architect of the 9/11 attacks and earlier high-profile strikes on American targets – appears on its face to have brought Afghanistan full circle: back to the incendiary circumstances that led to 9/11.

Indeed, U.S. officials say that by harboring Al Qaeda leaders, the Taliban have breached the Doha agreement negotiated by then-President Donald Trump in 2020 and accepted by Mr. Biden. The U.S.-Taliban deal included a Taliban commitment to prevent Afghan soil from being used to plan attacks on the United States, in exchange for a troop withdrawal ending America’s 20-year military involvement in the country.

But, say analysts, the Taliban have never condemned Al Qaeda nor cut ties, and the presence and killing of Mr. Zawahri in Kabul – just a 15-minute stroll from the presidential palace – expose a collision of differing expectations between the U.S. and Taliban that is likely to worsen.

And there is plenty of interpretation over what Mr. Zawahri’s presence in Kabul meant. Was it a flouting of Doha? Or evidence the Taliban were trying to keep tabs on Al Qaeda?

The U.S. attack reveals the scale of the challenge for the Taliban, who need to balance a desire to maintain their ultraconservative, jihadist bona fides while pushing for recognition as a legitimate government, worthy of open Western embassies and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid.

Their “overwhelming victory” gave “the Taliban a sense that they are unstoppable, that they don’t need to obey anything other than what they believe is right, whether that’s Al Qaeda, whether that’s girls’ education, whether that’s human rights,” says Rahmatullah Amiri, a Kabul-based independent analyst and expert on the Taliban.

The drone strike “is a wake-up call for them, and this will shake them up a bit, that the golden days are almost over,” says Mr. Amiri, contacted in Europe. The Taliban, he says, do not think twice about hosting fellow Muslim militants; they don’t ask questions, as long as those militants don’t challenge the Taliban; and they don’t believe that in 2001 Al Qaeda actually carried out the 9/11 attacks.

“Back then it was not discussed. Now it is not discussed,” says Mr. Amiri. To the Taliban, hosting the Al Qaeda leader “is not such a strange thing. It’s totally fine.”

A powerful precedent, “very difficult for other Taliban to reject,” was set by Mullah Omar, Mr. Amiri adds. The shadowy first leader of the Taliban chose to let the American military destroy the Taliban’s self-declared Islamic Emirate in 2001 rather than hand Osama bin Laden over to the Americans. Al Qaeda’s charismatic founder was killed by a U.S. SEAL team in Pakistan in 2011.

Differing approaches

Yet even more is at stake for the Taliban today, as both sides navigate their differing approaches.

“This Doha agreement can’t be done if there is no good-faith relationship,” says Mr. Amiri. “The Taliban can successfully control Al Qaeda; it’s probably the only group that can. But why would the Taliban agree to do that for the U.S., which they fought for 20 years?

“The U.S. is trying to make an ally out of the Taliban against Al Qaeda, which is very difficult,” he adds. “But now that they took this guy out, the chance of friendship on such issues is becoming more and more unlikely.”

The Taliban have a mixed record regarding fellow jihadis. In the past year, they have continued to fight brutal battles to crush the Islamic State franchise in Afghanistan, which accuses the Taliban of selling out to the West.

The United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, told the Security Council in January that the Taliban had worked to prevent “major” attacks by the Islamic State, but that the “desire of the de facto authorities” to take on the threat from “numerous terrorist groups ... remains to be convincingly demonstrated.”

Graeme Smith, a senior Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group, says Mr. Zawahri’s presence in Kabul “highlights the difficult balancing act the Taliban have been trying to do politically.”

“There is a saying in Pashto that you can’t hold two watermelons in one hand,” he says. “In this case the watermelons are the jihadi supporters of the Taliban on one side, and the international community on the other.”

Talks with Germany

Current Taliban discussions with the German government about restoring an embassy presence and investing in economic development starkly illustrate the dilemma.

Aside from the fact that the original German Embassy was destroyed by a 2017 suicide truck bomb that killed 150 people – the blast was attributed to the Haqqani network, whose leader Sirajuddin Haqqani is now acting interior minister – the building is located a two-minute walk from where Mr. Zawahri was killed, in a villa reportedly owned by a senior aide to Mr. Haqqani.

“Think about the hosting the Taliban were trying to do there,” says Mr. Smith. “They were trying to have nice European embassies quite literally a stone’s throw from people who want to murder foreigners. ... They were trying to work some strategic ambiguity, and this [CIA strike] lifted the veil on that.”

The result, he says, is that the Taliban are now subject to suspicion from both sides. The international community fears the Taliban are back in the business of harboring terrorists. And, he adds, there will be “vast suspicion from jihadis,” too, who will want to connect the dots between a high-level Taliban meeting with U.S. officials last week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan – where the urgent humanitarian situation and release of Afghan central bank reserves made up the agenda – and then, soon after, the death of the Al Qaeda chief.

But there may be more to the Taliban’s variable relationship with Islamist militants, and, in fact, with the Americans, including the possibility the Taliban are making real efforts, in their own manner, to curb attacks.

Mr. Smith notes a history of de-confliction that dates back to 2018 at least, when the Taliban and U.S. forces stayed out of each other’s way, as they separately hunted down Islamic State militants.

More recently, the Taliban have been cantoning Taliban-aligned foreign fighters, including, reportedly, Uyghur militants, in areas away from their borders.

“What does that behavior indicate? To me it looks like they were trying to keep these guys under control,” says the International Crisis Group analyst. “Publicly, they don’t admit these guys are on the ground,” he adds. “Privately, they’ll say, ‘In the Doha deal we promised to keep an eye on these guys, and we’re holding them close.’”

What did Taliban promise?

Indeed, according to Andrew Watkins, an expert on Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Taliban negotiators told U.S. diplomats in Doha as early as 2019 that they only intended to keep tabs on Al Qaeda, but no more.

The careful language of the U.S.-Taliban agreement reflects that, and only commits the Taliban to preventing attacks from Afghan soil – not cutting ties with Al Qaeda or other militants.

“We do have some evidence that the Taliban are very highly aware of the consequences of allowing Al Qaeda to move about the country, or to operate unrestrained and unfettered,” says Mr. Watkins. He notes reports from early 2021 of a formal order issued by the Taliban leadership to junior commanders across the country to not harbor foreign fighters or take them under their wing.

“Obviously, that’s a case we now see of, ‘Do as we say, not as we do,’” says Mr. Watkins. “But it can also be read as evidence that the Taliban – in their own way – understood the importance of managing their relationship with Al Qaeda.”

That awareness will have only been heightened by the CIA drone strike, which killed a “guest” of the Taliban who presumably thought he was protected in the anonymous folds of Taliban territory.

“Whatever else, we know that today’s Taliban leadership does take the threat of American intervention seriously,” says Mr. Watkins. “Perhaps not full-scale, boots on the ground, but the fact that we haven’t seen the Taliban’s emir emerge in public, and the degree of paranoia in senior Taliban figures being filmed, photographed, or appearing in public at all, is one little testament to how seriously the Taliban take the continued threat from the Americans.”