“The killing of al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success. But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe haven for al-Qaeda.”
Bill Roggio, a terrorism expert and editor of the Long War Journal, has always had few doubts, and he was right. Kabul, a year after the shameful and hasty retreat of the Americans, resembles in an increasingly sinister way the Kabul of the early 2000s: a Kabul over which the only possible peace is of the ‘pax Talibana’, which looks so much like the peace of cemeteries. It’s a Kabul in which the West entered with a controversial decision to fight terrorism and which, 20 years later, it abandoned, shaking hands with the same terrorists it had fought. The US also signed shameful peace agreements that basically envisaged a single condition for the Taliban: that they terminate relations with al-Qaeda and, therefore, that Afghanistan does not once again become the privileged base for international terrorism.