Al-Qaeda was quite open about its continuing relationship with the Taliban.
A year after the fall of Afghanistan, let us recall the words of President Joe Biden, August 20, 2021, explaining why it was safe to abandon the country:
What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone? We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as — as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.
Now, the assertion that al-Qaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan was so obviously false that even sympathetic media and Biden’s own administration acknowledged at the time that it wasn’t so. Politifact rated the claim false: “Biden is wrong to say that al-Qaida is gone entirely; officials in his administration have said the terrorist group remains active.” CNN “fact-checker” Daniel Dale:
Biden’s claim that al Qaeda is “gone” from Afghanistan is false — as his own administration acknowledged soon afterward. Following Biden’s remarks, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters, “We know that al Qaeda is a presence, as well as ISIS, in Afghanistan, and we’ve talked about that for quite some time.” . . . Colin Clarke, senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, a nonprofit that studies global security issues, said Biden’s comment was so “patently false” that he wondered if it was an accidental slip of the tongue. Clarke said there is no actual debate about whether al Qaeda is still in Afghanistan, though there is debate about how many members are there.
Still, the Biden administration reassured us, the Taliban could now be trusted to keep them out, on the basis of what one special inspector general report described as “vague assurances that al-Qaeda would not use Afghan territory to strike the United States and its allies.” Biden told the country that the Taliban were “looking to gain some legitimacy” and were, at worst, “going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government.” This was the tip of the iceberg of how Biden cooperated with the Taliban and chose to hand over the country to them.
In May of this year, another Defense Department inspector general report assessed that any limits the Taliban placed on al-Qaeda were for show and not likely to last, while al-Qaeda’s “media operations . . . have increased since August 2021”:
USCENTCOM predicted that the Taliban will likely loosen its restrictions on al-Qaeda in the future. . . . This quarter, USCENTCOM assessed that while al-Qaeda’s leaders have longstanding relationships with senior Taliban leaders, the group maintains limited capabilities to travel and train within Afghanistan and is likely restricted due to the Taliban’s efforts to achieve international legitimacy. The DoS assessed that the Taliban has taken steps to implement many of its counterterrorism commitments in the 2020 Doha Agreement with the U.S. Government regarding al-Qaeda and other groups, though continued monitoring and engagement will remain essential. However, USCENTCOM assessed that the Taliban will likely loosen these restrictions over the next 12 to 24 months, allowing al-Qaeda greater freedom of movement and the ability to train, travel, and potentially re-establish an external operations capability. . . .
[General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., the outgoing commander of USCENTCOM] said that the Taliban was less firm in dealing with al-Qaeda than with ISIS-K. He said the Taliban has taken some public actions in an attempt to signal that it is controlling al-Qaeda, which still maintains an aspirational desire to attack the United States. However, he said that the cultural interweaving of the two groups complicates the relationship and makes it difficult for the Taliban to control al-Qaeda’s actions. . . . According to the DIA, the Taliban is probably willing to allow legacy al-Qaeda members to remain in Afghanistan provided they do not threaten the regime’s security or autonomy. . . . According to media reporting, al-Qaeda’s reluctance to embarrass the Taliban by carrying out attacks may only be temporary—especially since the Taliban has not publicly disavowed its ties to the group.
For its part, as the report observed, al-Qaeda was quite open about its continuing relationship with the Taliban:
On February 15, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video stating that he views Afghanistan as a staging ground for the group’s ongoing global fight against the West. Al-Zawahiri has sworn a personal oath of loyalty to the Taliban’s leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. According to media analysis, the al-Qaeda network and its sympathizers perceive that they shared in the success of the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan, and they have been emboldened by this turn of events.
Additionally, the February edition of al-Qaeda’s magazine, “Ummah Wahidah,” included an editorial praising the Taliban regime as a functional alternative to democratic governments. According to media analysis, al-Qaeda continues to maintain its existing conceptual framework in which the Taliban serves as a government while al-Qaeda stands as the global terrorist vanguard.
As we now know, al-Zawahiri was located in the Taliban’s capital of Kabul, making himself enough at home that he sat out peacefully on his balcony every morning, in a home that appears to have been owned by a top aide to Taliban interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. A “senior administration official” acknowledged in an on-the-record briefing the Haqqani connection:
For several years, the U.S. government has been aware of a network that we assessed supported Zawahiri. In the last year, we had been watching for indications of al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan. . . . Senior Haqqani Taliban figures were aware of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul. . . .
We are also aware that Haqqani Taliban members took actions after the strike to conceal Zawahiri’s former presence at the location. We have identified a concerted effort to restrict access to the safe house and the surrounding area for hours after the strike. The safe house used by Zawahiri is now empty. The Haqqani Taliban members acted quickly to remove Zawahiri’s wife, his daughter, and her children to another location, consistent with a broader effort to cover up that they had been living in the safe house.
Biden’s secretary of state admitted that they’d been had:
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday accused the Taliban of “grossly” violating the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering al Qaeda’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Kabul. Blinken said the Taliban defied “repeated assurances to the world that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists to threaten the security of other countries.”
The “senior administration official” continued to claim that “this is a very important point for us to make clear to the Taliban that we expect them to abide by the terms of the Doha Agreement,” but also acknowledged that “the presence of Zawahiri in downtown Kabul was a clear violation of that.”
The May report also noted the difficulties created by withdrawal from Afghanistan, and those problems remain notwithstanding the success of the Zawahiri operation:
U.S. air assets must travel long distances to arrive over Afghan airspace, which limits the amount of time they can conduct operations before needing to return for refueling. This limitation, combined with the loss of human intelligence on the ground, has significantly reduced the DoD’s capacity to track terrorist targets in Afghanistan.
Retired four-star Army general Jack Keane, a Fox News analyst, now says that “we’re right back where we started.” And Biden is still who he was revealed to be a year ago.