"When I ended our military mission in Afghanistan almost a year ago, I decided that the United States no longer needed to deploy thousands of troops in Afghanistan to protect America from terrorists who would harm us," US President Joe Biden recalled, when he announced the killing of al-Qaeda boss Aiman al-Zawahiri by an American drone in the Afghan capital Kabul on Monday.
The remote war on terror is working, it seems. And al-Qaeda – once considered the West's greatest threat – seems as good as finished. But this appearance is deceptive.
Even Biden's own people see it differently. According to a report by the US Congressional Research Service in May of this year, US intelligence services see al-Qaeda as one of the groups "probably posing the greatest threat to American people and interests in the world." And even the US general charged with commanding drone counter-terrorism has declared that this alone will not effectively counter the threat.
The al-Qaeda core group in the Afghan-Pakistani border area has probably shrunk to a few hundred men. And according to the intelligence services, this former management team is no longer able to control the international branches of the organization. But elsewhere in the world the al-Qaeda brand is booming – for example in Central Asia, the Sahel zone, Yemen or the Horn of Africa. The al-Qaeda subsidiary al-Shabaab in Somalia is so strong that the US is again sending troops there. And in Mali, the Bundeswehr is part of a fight against al-Qaeda that has so far seemed unwinnable. Not even IS has such a worldwide reach.
Terrorism experts like to sum up the situation like this: al-Qaeda as an organization is dead, but al-Qaeda as a principle lives on, say terror experts. This principle can be summarized as follows: The fight for an Islamic-dominated world must first be won against the imperialist West, and for this jihadists from all countries must unite and support each other in a decentralized manner. This principle is extremely survivable.
Although al-Qaeda has not been able to carry out any major attacks in the West for a long time, the organization's ability to network is destabilizing states and regions in Europe's immediate vicinity.
Next to Russian neo-imperialism, this instability is the greatest threat to us. It brings war, refugees and new terror models, see IS. However, this danger can only be combated politically and thus from within the societies in which it arises. This is not possible with a drone deployment at the click of a mouse.
