“Few events can be as debilitating as a great victory,” wrote the eminent liberal Israeli journalist Amos Elon in his 1971 book, The Israelis. Elon was referring to the Six-Day War of 1967, which gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories. Israelis rejoiced, unaware that they had been given a poisoned chalice. America’s victory in the Cold War in 1989 followed a similar pattern: when Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed one after another, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and its policy elite basked in triumphalism, seeing democracy as the natural order of things to come. The war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties did not shatter the smug belief in a linear direction of historical Progress entertained by the powers-that-be; both events were horrific, but they were localized. Convinced that no geopolitical threats existed anymore, America sold its military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new kind of war, whose goal was purely humanitarian. Such was the misleading effect of the victory in the 44-year-long Cold War.

The realization that the end of the Cold War had given us not peace, but an even more dangerous and far more unstable world occurred in stages. And 9/11 was the first shock, magnified by the technology of television, which repeatedly showed the twin towers in lower Manhattan collapsing into a fiery pile of dust and rubble. The event hit Americans, lulled into the complacency of the Nineties, with the psychological force of Pearl Harbor, to which it was repeatedly compared. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the world was already at war. The Nazis had already occupied France, and were at the gates of Moscow. The Japanese had already invaded China and committed the Rape of Nanjing. Thus, for Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on the Axis Powers was not only the right thing to do, but also the natural thing.

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The direction of history after the attacks of 9/11 was not so clear. The world was otherwise at peace. The Chinese were still in the early phase of building a great navy, around which their military capability would be oriented. Moreover, China was still governed by the reformer Jiang Zemin, a leader friendly to the United States. Vladimir Putin had been in power less than two years and was still consolidating control. It was unclear in what direction he would take Russia. Great power conflict was the furthest thing from people’s minds.

And so, with China and Russia out of the mental picture, the public debate went from unreflectively assuming democracy was about to overtake the world to falling in line behind the Global War on Terrorism. In this way, 9/11 was incorporated into post-Cold War triumphalism. Indeed, as 9/11 had demonstrated, and as the conventional thinking went, the Arab world was politically sick, and the cure was to bring democracy to the greater Middle East.

The administration of President George W. Bush was actually slow to come to this conclusion. Caught off guard by the devastating attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House, burdened by guilt and thus determined that no chances could be taken in protecting American security, immediately conceived of a war to topple the Afghan regime of the Taliban, the hosts of the 9/11 killers. Two months after the attacks, the US military and its Afghan allies occupied the Afghan capital of Kabul. Victory had come easy, perhaps too easy, owing to an innovative, economy-of-force strategy emphasizing special operations forces and local Afghan fighters. But again, without much reflection, rebuilding Afghanistan was turned over to the big, conventional US Army bureaucracy, whose conception of Afghanistan — despite inventive interludes under certain commanders — would turn out to be analogous to that of the Soviet occupiers in the Eighties, who themselves withdrew in defeat.

Because Afghanistan was too easy (as it was then thought), and 9/11 still reverberated in a loud, deafening manner, a bigger response was conceived: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime in Iraq. After all, from a human rights perspective there was no worse regime in the world except for North Korea’s. And Bosnia and Kosovo had set the pattern for humanitarian interventions. As I can attest from reporting on the ground in the Middle East, Iraq back then was actually far more repressive than Iran, which had an element of democracy built into its theocratic system under the reformist president Mohammed Khatami, and more repressive even than fellow-Baathist Syria. Though the proof of Saddam aiding al-Qaeda was very flimsy at best, he was certainly supporting many other Arab terrorist groups. Then there was the issue of Iraq seeking a nuclear bomb, which not only the American intelligence community but other Western intelligence agencies assumed to be the case. This is not a defense of invading Iraq — a war I initially supported — merely an argument of how it was not outright madness to consider such an action in sequence, considering that China and Russia were not yet on the radar screen as great power threats, and 9/11 still overwhelmed the public debate.

History is ironic. Had 9/11 not occurred; had Saddam not acted like a guilty man, trying to convince the world that he had a nuclear program even though he didn’t; had the Bush administration’s guilt over 9/11 not led it to a take-no-chances approach in the Middle East, there likely never would have been an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

History is also governed by odd contingencies. Had several Arab armies not threatened Israel in the spring of 1967 — specifically, had King Hussein of Jordan heeded the many warnings not to open a military front against Israel in the West Bank — Israel would not have come into possession of an Arab population totaling 1.25 million at the time. The Jewish settlers’ movement never would have been born, forever deforming Israeli politics in the process. Egypt would have stayed stuck with ruling Gaza. And later on, Iran’s clerical regime, despite its hatred of Israel and the Jews, would have had much less propaganda material to work with. The results of the 1967 War could well be interpreted as a tragedy for Israel; just as the effect of 9/11 could be interpreted as a tragedy for the United States even beyond the initial, massive loss of life, spawning as it did a long and misconceived occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous war in Iraq.

The problem is that extremism can be emotionally satisfying, especially after a great event or catastrophe. Moderation does not do well when people are literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem like after the 1967 War, or baying for blood like after 9/11, or likewise after 7 October 2023 in Israel. Calls for regime change in Iraq or flattening Gaza appeal to the emotions and not to the intellect. That is their strength. The nuanced, middle-of-the-road technocrats and area specialists are at their weakest in such moments. The last American president who after a great, foreign outrage pursued limited objectives was the moderate conservative George H. W. Bush. Following Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked aggression of Kuwait in 1990, Bush decided to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule but otherwise leave Saddam in power and not invade Iraq, where America would likely have been bogged down for years to come. By saving his successor, President Bill Clinton, from this fate, Bush allowed Clinton to inherit a largely pacified geopolitical climate that, in turn, allowed Clinton to focus on humanitarian wars-of-choice in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the relatively benign geopolitical climate bequeathed by the elder Bush was largely responsible for the naïve hubris of much of the American policy elite in the Nineties.

Remember that after the Napoleonic Wars, it was enlightened conservatives such as the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, the British statesman Viscount Castlereagh, and the French statesman Talleyrand who, by not pursuing extreme and vindictive solutions, however emotionally satisfying they would have been at the time, bought Europe almost a century of peace. Ironically, it was the assumption that peace was the natural order of things that led several great European powers to stumble naively into the First World War.

Similarly, the success of limited interventions in Panama in 1989, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 allowed significant sectors of the American elite to believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the US military could do anything in a world ordered to American goals and interests. It was this delusion that allowed the United States to stumble into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond the gargantuan loss of life and treasure that the 9/11 wars cost the United States and the affected local populations, perhaps the greatest catastrophe was America’s grand strategic distraction while Russian and Chinese power grew exponentially. The decade of 9/11 wars was the decade when the Chinese military, especially its navy, unleashed its momentum of growth which continues to this day. Meanwhile, Putin consolidated his power in the Russian military and intelligence services, permitting him to rebuild the armed forces under virtual one-man rule for the first time since Stalin.

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The result of all this has not been pretty. Terrorism has certainly not been eliminated. As Joseph Conrad showed in The Secret Agent (1907), all it takes is an angry, politically motivated individual or two, burrowing in the heart of a city, anonymous to their neighbors, to perpetrate great atrocities. And great power conflict now exists alongside terrorism. Despite the attempts by middle-level powers to navigate between the United States and China and chart a course of their own, the very survival of the global system is now in jeopardy. This is the world that has followed what was believed to have been the triumphant end to the Cold War. And 9/11 was a crucial inflection point in this tragic process: distracting us when we should have been focused on Russia and China. It was indeed a great head fake.

Alas, there is no relief from history. The rise and fall of great powers is never-ending, and policymakers’ tragic mistakes are baked into the process. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was avenged by the US victory over Japan in 1945, the United States is still searching for some sort of meaningful historical reply to 9/11 a quarter-century later. Indeed, our 9/11 wars, particularly in Iraq, only emboldened clerical Iran and enlarged its geopolitical footprint. The current war with Iran is part of the process that began with 9/11. The attacks brought us into a generational military struggle in the Middle East that shows no sign of abatement. And it isn’t only the Middle East’s inherent instability that is the problem, but our very obsession with it. Tragedy, as Shakespeare repeatedly shows, is borne of obsession.

Known in Spain as El Pelirrojo (“the Ginger”), Suri was not the sort of ginger jihadi Britain produced, the kind who chased you around Whitechapel distributing leaflets proclaiming “sharia-controlled zones”. Instead, he belonged more in a Joseph Conrad novel. Living a quiet life in Neasden, he fused Islamist ideology, Marxism and modern insurgent tactics into a worldview whose legacy has colored countless later terrorist campaigns. For while bin Laden became famous for the hierarchy of al-Qaeda, Suri quite deliberately, wanted its opposite. As such, modern violent Islamism, with its lone-wolf protagonists and random stabbings, takes from Suri, not bin Laden, even as the Syrian’s legacy continues to loom large.

Born in 1958, into a conservative Aleppan family with a strong Sufi tradition, Suri came of age as Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syrian dictator from 1970, was tightening his grip on power — and crushing the Islamist opposition as he went. As a young man, Suri joined an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Fighting Vanguard, and which concluded that the only way to overthrow the regime was through armed struggle. Trained in explosives, Suri was part of a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the Assad regime, culminating in a massacre of army cadets in 1979.

The confrontation reached its climax in 1982, when the Fighting Vanguard, joined by local supporters, rose against the regime in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s brother Refaat crushed the rebellion with  brutal force, effectively ending the Muslim Brotherhood as an organized force inside Syria and scattering the survivors of the Fighting Vanguard. Many, including Suri, made their way to Afghanistan to fight the USSR.

Suri found himself in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, alongside Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric often described as the godfather of global jihad. In the rugged mountains abutting Afghanistan, he also met a wealthy Saudi benefactor — Osama bin Laden. According to Suri’s own account, he spent three years training bin Laden and other so-called “Afghan Arabs” before traveling to Madrid, acquiring Spanish nationality by way of marriage, then eventually settling in London in 1994.

In the Nineties, London had become an unlikely haven for Islamists, to the late 20th-century Muslim world what Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut had been to political dissidents in the 19th. The city’s cosmopolitan character made it the intellectual center of the Anglophone Muslim world, teeming with bookshops, activists, Afghan war veterans and assorted other political exiles — all trying to make sense of their movement’s future.

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It was in London, too, that Islamists began developing a bewildering range of political philosophies. At one end stood Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, looking to Britain’s parliamentary democracy for inspiration. At the other were those who dreamed of planting the black flag over 10 Downing Street. It was in this extraordinary milieu that Suri started turning the lessons of Syria and Afghanistan into a theory of global insurgency.

That theory marked a radical departure from the way Islam’s martial tradition had long been understood. Traditionally, anti-colonial figures in places like Algeria had conceived of jihad as a form of resistance. To them, noble means led to noble ends. The rules were simple: the enemy was the Western invader. No women. No children. No priests. Only combatants.

Suri threw those assumptions aside. Instead, he asked a wholly different set of questions, the sort that anarchists and Marxists wrestled with in the last century. Does terror achieve political aims? How should asymmetric warfare be waged? Are Muslim governments legitimate targets, as the Algerian military junta had become for Islamist militants? In many ways, Suri reimagined jihad into what the American writer Robert Taber called “war of the flea”: a strategy of guerrilla warfare, terror and asymmetry designed for the weak against the strong.

For a brief moment, following a series of terror attacks in France, Suri was noticed by MI5. But that was about it. The British security services largely turned a blind eye to Islamist activity throughout the Nineties, partly because they had yet to grasp the problem of blowback. There was also an understanding, as the infamous Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque once put it, that Islamist dissidents were free to agitate against their own governments so long as they did not bite the hand that fed them.

There was another calculation too. Some of these dissidents might one day overthrow the regimes they opposed, so it was better to keep them close than drive them underground. Indeed, some of the sons and daughters of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood exiles, who themselves grew up in London, are now advising the government in Damascus. Suri, however, always had far more global ambitions. In 1991, he attended the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Sudan, where he mingled with everyone from Hezbollah militants to Afghan mujahideen to Carlos the Jackal. Another attendee recalls meeting Suri there, describing him as intensely angry and confrontational.

Back in London, Suri helped publish the influential Islamist magazine Al-Ansar, publishing letters from leading jihadist figures, including al-Qaeda’s future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Suri also arranged for Western journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden, becoming one of the unlikely intermediaries between Britain’s Islamist exile scene and the emerging leadership of al-Qaeda. Suri was also an advocate of the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar, encouraging bin Laden to fall in line and preserve the nascent emirate.

By the late Nineties, Suri had returned to Afghanistan, settling in the outskirts of Kabul. Talha Ahsan, a former jihadist and Dulwich College alumnus who met Suri at this time, remembers him as “one of the smartest people” he had ever encountered. His vision foreshadowed practices that later became commonplace among groups such as ISIS. As Ahsan tells me, Suri believed in recruiting criminals, men with the courage to do things that bourgeois kids like himself could not. It was precisely these sorts of men, alienated from ordinary life, who would later carry out many of the atrocities that scarred Europe during ISIS’s heyday.

Suri’s 1600-page magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which appeared online in 2004, was a hard-nosed articulation of what modern jihad should look like. In it, he anticipated the lone wolf and the autonomous cell, each operating without a rigid hierarchy. The destruction of the Fighting Vanguard had convinced Suri that formal organizations were too easily dismantled. Jihad, then, had to become leaderless, to exist beyond any single group. In modern parlance, he wanted the fight to go viral.

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To that extent, Suri was not opposed to the objectives behind 9/11 — so much as the way al-Qaeda was organized. He well knew that charismatic leaders could be hunted down, leaving the movement in disarray. Bin Laden’s death and the subsequent decline of al-Qaeda, followed years later by ISIS’s struggles after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to prove him right. All the while, Suri argued that jihadist organizations wasted too much energy on theological infighting, instead of concentrating on what he saw as their wider struggle against the West and its allies.

Though Suri remained in the fringes during his lifetime, his ideas nonetheless seeped into the Islamist discourse via the internet and radical preachers. There are doubts as to how far he masterminded the Madrid bombings of 2004 and 7/7, yet both attacks were certainly Suri-esque. “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries,” he remarked later. “Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

Beyond outrages like 7/7, Suri’s decentralized approach helped inspire other atrocities: including Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down an American airliner in 2009. The countless stabbings, vehicle attacks and small-scale acts of terror carried out over the next 15 years would become the most enduring and disturbing expressions of Suri’s ideas.

Suri himself spent his last years hiding from the Pakistani authorities, before being captured and transferred to a Syrian prison around 2005. Widely believed to have died there, he disappeared into the same system of repression that had shaped him decades earlier.  But his ideas did not die with him. For if bin Laden is remembered as the face of global jihad, Suri may prove the more consequential figure in the long run, especially as warfare is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unconventional. Besides all that, the Syrian who once edited magazines in London, and took British journalists to meet bin Laden, bequeathed his successors something more durable than an organization. He left behind a method, one that continues to echo wherever individuals kill not in the name of a group — but, in vivid Conradesque fashion, in the name of an idea.

While a recent US military review concluded that Logari’s plot was not preventable, the findings were less a vindication of America’s chaotic withdrawal than a reminder of how the US–Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many Afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS–KP), the Afghan branch of Isis. But it appears the US had stopped listening to their warnings; and in doing so, it helped to create the very conditions that led to the Abbey Gate attack.

One of the men who had warned them was Ahmad Zia Seraj, the General Director of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Once a revered spy chief targeted by the Taliban for assassination, Seraj, now a refugee waiting for his residency papers and teaching at King’s College London, cut a very different figure when we met in a London hotel at the end of last year.

Long before the US withdrawal, Seraj had been telling the American top brass about the threat of IS–KP, and is still doing so. “We had detainees from 15 different nationalities in our NDS detention facilities,” he told me. In fact, Seraj had personally interrogated Logari. He knew him as Hamed, a “bright, intelligent young man who spoke several languages fluently”. Seraj described how he brought religious scholars and even Logari’s father to his cell in an attempt to dissuade Logari from becoming a suicide bomber. But it was no use: “Once a person wants to become a suicide bomber, there’s nothing that can stop him.” Logari didn’t want freedom; he wanted paradise.

Seraj told me that he had shared everything the NDS had with the CIA, who would then brief Nato’s commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, and other US officials. “Frankly speaking we were on the same page.” In fact, he warned anyone who would listen — whether the US, Pakistan, or Central Asian states — about the security threats. So why was he ignored?

During the postmortem of the chaotic US withdrawal, Biden blamed Trump and the US military intelligence apparatus which didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. He also blamed the Afghan government and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight. It seemed to play on tropes and criticisms made by journalists and Afghans for decades that Afghanistan was run by corrupt politicians and warlords.

Trump had dealt Biden a bad hand when he came to office in January 2021. The Afghan–American relationship had been damaged ever since the Doha Accords were signed between the Americans and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement stipulated that the US would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021; the Taliban, in turn, promised to cut ties with al-Qaeda and sit down for peace talks with the Kabul government. Yet the democratically elected Afghan government wasn’t part of the discussions. 

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The deal had been engineered by Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, an experienced figure who served under various US presidents, including Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, but whose rough and tumble diplomacy was not liked in Kabul. The US envoy had reached out to the Taliban without consulting the Afghan government. As Abdullah Khanjani, the government’s Deputy Minister for Peace, told me: “One of the key strategic problems with the whole structure of the peace process was that the Americans did not integrate the Afghan state and Afghan voices into it.”

By contrast, the negotiations empowered and legitimised the Taliban. According to Khanjani, with the Doha Accords, “a strategic propaganda opportunity was given to the Taliban, as an insurgent group. [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo sat there to endorse the deal with the legitimacy of being ex-CIA. And this was a shock to everyone. It was a game changer for the Taliban. And this also normalised the Taliban and [changed] the international system of power relations.” A green light was given for other countries to follow suit.

The Doha Accords also set the stage for the Abbey Gate attack. The terms of the deal included a prisoner swap, with the Taliban receiving 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 captives. The Afghan government was incensed by the condition: the US seemed to be treating Afghanistan as if it was not a sovereign nation but a plaything of empire. One day after the accords were signed, President Ashraf Ghani told reporters that “the government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free[ing] 5,000 Taliban prisoners”, adding that 400 of those prisoners were “a threat to the world”. Seraj told me that many of those prisoners were involved in high-profile attacks including those on the German embassy in 2017, the Intercontinental Hotel in January 2018 and the G4S compound in November 2018. Some of those released, according to a senior government official, were not Taliban fighters but belonged to IS–KP and were related to the Taliban through familial and tribal links. Their release would mean that many would return to the insurgency. 

Neither the preliminary intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha nor the prisoner swap that followed resulted in a reduction in violence. Instead, they gnawed away at the state, creating the conditions for the chaos to come. According to Shuja Jamal, international relations director at the Afghan government’s National Security Council, more than 21,000 Afghan army soldiers were killed, injured, taken prisoner or deserted between March and October 2020. Attacks on journalists and politicians increased as well.

But perhaps more importantly, the prisoner swap demoralised the NDS — the very agency that the US needed to share vital local information. The officers who had interrogated the prisoners could now be identified and targeted by the Taliban and IS–KP. As Seraj explained, many of the NDS officers no longer wanted to risk carrying out interrogations and debriefings if the prisoners would be released.

“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it,” Seraj added. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence-gathering, but this soon proved impossible. Instead, Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. And as government forces neared collapse, more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80% of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates.”

The US withdrawal also meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight.” It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft, but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones, but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result, it could not support the US-backed government in Kabul and instead provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times, but they would often deny or deflect the issue. 

The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Tehran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. “There was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban,” Seraj said. “It’s not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process.”

When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security.” However, as Alexander Ward shows in his new book, The Internationalists, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review, he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.

Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept on Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy,” Mohib told me. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their “partners” and destroyed any goodwill left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.

In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government, warning that many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying.”

Four months later, Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible: Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops, but in its eagerness to leave, created the conditions for suicide bombers to flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role. 

Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army immediately broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare, but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over 100 battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated.” 

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On 22 June, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood. 

Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers only led to more chaos. When they ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise.

On 2 July, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base, the key entry point for American hardware and personnel for 20 years. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of that month, the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August, the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear. 

By the time the president fled Kabul on 15 August, all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom. And among the throng was Logari. 

Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, Ghani had called him personally saying that “we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation”. At the time, Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif — the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for 20 minutes.”

One by one, his WhatsApp groups also fell silent, as ministers and senior civil servants started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we’re fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for orders, but he had none to give, except that they should lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country, and he joined his wife who was already in London. 

As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. Today, there are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council recently noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024 alone. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived: in a piece published this month, al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets. 

In such a world, it’s hard not to be reminded of Seraj’s earlier warning: “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”

The scene painted by the footage is both horrifyingly perplexing and peculiarly British. The sky is overcast. No one seems to be running or screaming, or trying to confront and overpower the killers. A consolatory moment is provided by the “Angel of Woolwich”, the woman who calmly conversed with and challenged the killers before taking off to catch her bus. In the background, there is a bundle in the middle of the road. It is the body of Lee Rigby.

Michael Adebolajo grew up and went to school in Havering, where East London spills into Essex. Nevertheless, he addresses bystanders as “you people”, telling them they will “never be safe” before warning that British soldiers must leave “our lands”, meaning Iraq and Afghanistan. To his mind, he is no longer a British man born to a Nigerian-Christian family and schooled in Romford, but a member of the global Ummah, which is under existential attack from the West.

The murderers never attributed their attack to al-Qaeda, but in many ways it fit the al-Qaeda bill. It was a highly specific act of violence, targeting a member of the enemy’s armed forces. It was the kind of attack the group’s Yemen branch had directly called for in their English-language magazine less than a year beforehand. It was so discriminate that Adebolajo was careful to assure bystanders they were not his targets, even going so far as to apologise to nearby women for the bloodshed. Two years later, the al-Qaeda trained Charlie Hebdo killers would similarly — and impatiently — remind a journalist that they had only killed blasphemers; that they hadn’t harmed “civilians”. This was honour, jihadi-style.

In other ways, Lee Rigby’s murder was the kind of gruesome spectacle that al-Qaeda’s leadership would later warn against, but which Islamic State would make their hallmark. A gruesome spectacle, but a shoddy and amateurish one, too: Adebolajo and Adebowale rammed Lee Rigby with a Vauxhall Tigra before trying, and failing, to behead their victim. The rusty antique revolver they had acquired malfunctioned, and they were denied martyrdom by arriving armed police.

By contrast, the Charlie Hebdo attackers came clad in all black tactical gear, wielded Kalashnikovs and raised their fists having avenged the Prophet. They looked the business, and they went down in a hail of bullets. Adebolajo, in his Stone Island beanie and Primarni toggle jacket, did not. Adebolajo and Adebowale didn’t pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda in their attack, but perhaps notably, al-Qaeda never claimed them either.

Still, this did not stop others from imitating them. As Raffaello Pantucci notes, it served to “lower the threshold of what constitutes a terrorist attack, suddenly making the act much more accessible”. It showed other extremists that neither a cell, explosives nor serious weaponry were necessarily prerequisites to action. In the days to follow, a soldier was stabbed in the neck in Paris, while a year later another young extremist convert was apprehended en route to behead a British soldier. Brusthom Ziamani, the would-be copycat who thought Michael Adebolajo a “legend”, has since emerged as a leading and troublesome figure among imprisoned jihadis. In 2020, while he was eight months into a deradicalisation programme, he attempted to murder a prison officer.

The fact that Adebolajo and Adebowale were careful to target a soldier — and only a soldier — reveals much about the evolution of jihadism and the ideological divides within it. While mass casualty attacks are associated with jihadist terror, prior to Isis, discriminate plots were more the norm in Europe: against Jews, military personnel and alleged blasphemers. There were even bitter divides within Adebolajo and Adebowale’s networks: some believed that attacks at home were illegitimate due to a covenant of security with Britain, while others came to view the covenant as null and void since UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

The 7/7 bombers deemed Britain a legitimate target, but it was not until Lee Rigby’s murder that jihadists were able to successfully attack again — an eight-year wait. Some observers assumed the jihadist threat was a thing of the past: Bin Laden was dead and the London Olympics came and went without a hitch. But it was the same year as the Woolwich attack that British extremists were trickling into Syria to fight — a trickle that became a flood in 2014 when Isis declared it had restored the Caliphate.

In the eight “quiet” years between attacks, Salafi-jihadist activity did not cease. The Islam that Adebolajo and Adebowale had converted to was the Islam of Omar Bakri Mohammad, Anjem Choudary and their acolytes in al-Muhajiroun. Its activity during the 2000s and early 2010s consisted of proselytising, attention-grabbing stunts, establishing European offshoots, and more proselytising. On a day-to-day basis, it also meant living according to the incredibly strict, incredibly demanding lifestyle of a Salafi-jihadist activist, which often involved cutting oneself off from friends, family, jobs and many of life’s pleasures — from football to television. It was to enter a totalitarian pact voluntarily.

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Because of his closeness to these networks, Adebolajo had flirted with the attention of security services on several occasions, but never enough to warrant intervention. In 2010, however, he was apprehended by Kenyan authorities; he was most likely on the way to join al-Shabaab in Somalia, with whom a number of Britons were already fighting at the time. Despite this, a Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report determined MI5 could not have prevented the attack. Instead, it blamed an unnamed American company — Facebook — which had closed several of Adebowale’s accounts without informing British authorities. Five months prior to the attack, Adebowale had even graphically communicated his desire to kill a British soldier. The trouble was the offending content was picked up algorithmically and closed automatically — no human being ever laid eyes on it.

At the time, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, determined that Facebook was the “one party which could have made a difference” in preventing the murder of Lee Rigby. In some quarters, particularly among civil liberties groups, this conclusion was viewed as all too convenient for the security services, as well as paving the way for more anti-terror legislation and more government control over the internet. The drumbeat for tech companies to act on terrorist and extremist content online would grow louder the following year, as Isis flooded social media with gore and Silicon Valley could no longer refuse to act. Today, it is nongovernmental groups as much as governments leading the charge for more control over the internet.

And yet, despite the infamy of Michael Adebolajo’s image, neither he nor his accomplice live on in the annals of jihadi lore. Although I’m told security services would cast doubt on these claims, Adebolajo allegedly regrets his act and the Jihadist worldview, a fact which is of no consolation to the family of his victim. Instead, it is Lee Rigby’s name and image which lives on — while his killers, denied their martyrdom, must live out their days anonymously and forgotten, somewhere in the bowels of His Majesty’s prison estate.

Swedish authorities condemned Paludan’s actions, while also reminding the world that the nation is committed to freedom of expression. Islamic authorities, meanwhile, have responded with outrage. Several countries have issued statements condemning Paludan — including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Oman — as well as the Scandinavian governments for offering police protection to those who would commit such blasphemy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan also issued two statements, one calling on Islamic countries to adopt a joint stance towards such acts, and another asking the Swedish government to take concrete action to punish the culprits.

If it does not, the consequences could be severe. Sweden has been pushing to join Nato since shortly after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. But in order to join the alliance, it needs the approval of every single nation already in it — and that includes Turkey. Even before Paludan’s stunt, President Erdogan’s administration wasn’t particularly inclined to welcome Sweden, which it had repeatedly accused of enabling Kurdish militants. And in retaliation, Turkey promptly suspended talks on Nato expansion. “So you will let terror organisations run wild on your avenues and streets and then expect our support for getting into Nato. That’s not happening,” the outraged President said.

“Erdoğan and his administration have… framed themselves as defenders of Sunni Muslims throughout the world and thus were obligated to react strongly,” explains Tom Lord, co-founder of the Militant Wire research network. Even if Turkey backs down, there is “a chance that Sweden’s accession could be leveraged by Erdoğan’s administration to gain concessions from the US and certain EU countries”.

But exclusion from Nato is not the only consequence Sweden could face. Paludan’s Quran-burning has sparked an extremely hostile online backlash from a range of jihadist groups. The Pakistani Taliban (TTP), Afghan Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and the central Asian Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) have condemned Sweden, though the tone and optics of the condemnations differ. The TTP’s release — issued by its spokesman Muhammad Khorasani — is more politically calculated and mild in its language, resembling the statement published by the Taliban interim government in Afghanistan. Khorasani states that freedom of speech should not overstep the respect for Islamic symbols, rituals and values, arguing that acts such as Paludan’s constitute a violation of “so-called international law” that global organisations should address — or else dangerous consequences will follow.

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At the other end of the spectrum, though, the Islamic State’s Af-Pak branch directly threatened and encouraged retaliatory attacks. It also impugned Islamic countries for issuing cowardly statements and staging weak protests without taking any practical action against the perpetrators and their countries of origin. Indeed, the response to the Quran-burning has caused tension not only between Sweden and Islamic groups, but between Islamic groups with different agendas. Pro-Al-Qaeda jihadist Hani al-Sibai issued a statement expressing anger not only against Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but also Arabic countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. He called for the “liberation” of Islamic countries from their regimes, which he described as puppets in the hands of the West.

Meanwhile ISKP took advantage of the incident to challenge its regional enemy, the Taliban. It mocked the interim government, saying that while it claims to have defeated the US in the name of jihad, it issued just a single tweet to condemn the desecration of the Quran in Sweden — while also receiving funds from the Swedish government and protecting foreign organisations. In the latest issue of the magazine Khorasan Ghag, published by ISKP mouthpiece Al-Azaim, the group dedicated several pages to blasphemous acts, threatening to conduct attacks not only in Sweden, but against European citizens wherever they are. Lashkar-e-Jhagvi, which recently resurfaced with its first attack in Pakistan after years of silence, issued a similarly bellicose statement, threatening Europeans with more attacks and lamenting that Muslim organisations with money and power are not taking direct action. Other pro-IS networks did likewise, promising to bring the bloodshed to the streets of Stockholm and wage war on Sweden, saying the “infidels” will continue burning Qurans if Muslims do not take up arms and instil fear into their Western enemies.

All these threats cannot be taken lightly, given the history of blasphemy-motivated terrorism in the West, and Europe in particular, in recent decades. The best-known examples include the beheading of Samuel Paty, the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and last year’s stabbing of Salman Rushdie. But there is an extensive history of plots and attacks targeting the citizens of countries where anti-Islam events take place. In 2005, after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Muhammad, a series of demonstrations and attacks were carried out. Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist, was targeted in two assassination attempts in 2008 and 2010. The first plot was foiled by Danish intelligence, which busted a three-man cell made up of two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent; the second attempt was orchestrated by a would-be attacker with links to Al-Qaeda’s East Africa branch, Al-Shabaab.

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Around the same time, in Sweden, similar assassination plots targeted Lars Vilks, who had drawn the Prophet Muhammad for a newspaper in 2007. Both Westergaard and Vilks survived repeated attempts on their lives. But when both died in 2021 — the former of illness and the latter in a car accident — radicals from across the jihadist spectrum, from Al-Qaeda to Islamic State to Taliban, celebrated. “The impact of the 2005 Jyllands-Posten and 2007 Lars Vilks cartoon controversies on the Western jihadi movement cannot be overstated,” extremism researcher Liam Duffy explains. “Al-Qaeda was able to exploit them as a radicalising tool due to the widespread anger outside of existing extremist circles…the blasphemous incidents were seen as an attack on Islam, even graver than the foreign policy grievances levied at the United States or Britain.”

For that reason, says Duffy, “Sweden and Denmark continued to be disproportionately targeted over other Western states all the way up until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which drew the jihadists’ attention away” — for a while. Now, Rasmus Paludan’s actions have made not only him a target but put Sweden and Denmark at markedly greater risk of terrorism again. Duffy refers to one IS-aligned propaganda group, which issued a direct threat towards Sweden, saying, “if there is no check on the freedom of your expression, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions”, pointing out that this is a reference to legendary jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki’s influential “The Dust Will Never Settle Down” lecture, which urged violence against blasphemers in the West.

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But despite all this — despite pro-Islamic State media outlet At-Taqwa calling upon supporters to kill Paludan and carry out violence against Sweden as well as other Western nations — the far-Right leader has not been deterred. Last Friday, he again set fire to a Quran, this time in front of a mosque in Copenhagen, before promising to do this “in front of the Turkish embassy every Friday until Sweden becomes a Nato member”. A couple of days later, retorting to accusations that he is on the Kremlin’s payroll (Putin would like nothing more than to see Sweden’s Nato membership blocked), he set another Quran on fire in front of the Russian embassy in Copenhagen, while making provocative statements directed at Chechnya.

Paludan’s activities may well have put paid to Sweden’s hopes of joining Nato, which would have implications for not only Scandinavian but also European security. They have also heightened the threat of terror across the West, while potentially making Westerners everywhere a target. Such acts have in the past inspired violence against both diplomatic missions and tourists. Meanwhile, they have soured both Sweden and Denmark’s relations with Islamic governments around the world. Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have even accused the nations of enabling Islamophobia, racism and discrimination. It is striking what one man’s repugnant actions can trigger.

A year on, how should we evaluate Biden’s declaration? Well, the Taliban has reinstalled a tyrannical theocratic government under which the precious freedoms gained by Afghan women over the past 20 years have been completely reversed. If the “best decision for America” involves trampling liberty and solidarity underfoot, then I don’t want to imagine what the worst decision would look like.

More tangibly, we were told that the Taliban would no longer harbour terrorists — Biden promised in his withdrawal speech “to make sure that Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland”. And yet, as Barbara Elias warned last year, this is not a promise the president had the power to keep. Links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda were and are too deep and strong to be severed. Elias cited worrying intelligence assessments that al-Qaeda could become a real threat to the US again as soon as 2023.

Her warning was vindicated two weeks ago, when Biden announced the successful killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri was killed in Kabul in an apartment rented by an aide of Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani, in turn, is the leader of the Haqqani network, a Taliban offshoot that the Wall Street Journal has called the group’s “most radical and violent branch”. The Taliban claimed they were unaware of Zawahiri’s presence in the heart of their capital, a statement that knowledgeable observers have rightly called out for its sheer effrontery.

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No doubt the truth about the current relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda will come out in due course. But the reasonable conclusion is that the two groups are still comfortably in bed with one another, and that al-Qaeda is once more using Afghanistan as a staging ground for its nefarious activities. We should welcome the killing of al-Zawahiri, of course, but his being found in Kabul gives the lie to Biden’s justification for the Afghanistan withdrawal.

In that withdrawal speech, Biden argued that “the real choice” was “between leaving or escalating”. This was a false dichotomy. America could have just carried on. Yes, perhaps Afghanistan was a very long way from becoming a proper democracy, but it would have been relatively inexpensive to keep a small force of a few thousand stationed there for a few more years, a fraction of the 100,000 troops stationed there in 2010–11. Even before the 2020 peace deal, US casualties in Afghanistan had been extremely low for years, with fatalities averaging in the low double digits since 2015. A small US force would have been more than enough to keep the Taliban out of total power.

From today’s perspective, however, it is no longer possible to view Biden’s withdrawal and the chaos that has ensued as a strategic error, however grave. You come back from errors, you reset and correct course. Instead, I have come to see the Afghanistan debacle as something more alarming: the result of a complete lack of strategy, or even the basic contours of a plan. What we have seen over the past year has been nothing other than chaos disguised as policymaking.

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At home, for instance, Biden took office promising to reunite a polarised nation. That went out the window last Monday, when Donald Trump’s residence was raided by the FBI less than 100 days from the midterms elections — allegedly over violations of an obscure record-keeping statute. Since then, prominent Republicans have accused the administration of parallel systems of justice, drawing comparisons with Third World countries. Who can blame them? The FBI barely made a case of Hilary Clinton’s lost cache of emails and an at-home secret server, and while federal prosecutors are investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax fraud (to say nothing of the shenanigans documented on Hunter’s infamous laptop), no one has yet seen fit to raid the First Son’s home.

Even more remarkable than the raid itself are the reports that Biden was not aware of it before it happened. Sending FBI agents to occupy the home of a former president — and Biden’s potential opponent in 2024 — is an unprecedented step. It will be politically explosive even if the bureau turns up evidence of wrongdoing, which is no guarantee given that the press, the Democratic Party, and various agencies of the US security state have investigated Trump’s alleged criminality again and again to little avail. That such a potentially destabilising step could be taken without Biden’s knowledge is almost literally unbelievable. If true, it would mean that the president is barely in charge of his own government.

This absence of a plan is also evident in Biden’s handling of Ukraine and Taiwan. Although the president deserves credit for the massive aid he has sent to Ukraine, he has repeatedly risked escalating the conflict with off-the-cuff remarks that contradict official US policy. During a visit to Poland in March, he seemed to call for regime change in Russia, inadvertently threatened to use chemical weapons, and appeared to tell American troops that they would soon be fighting in Ukraine. These comments were later clarified or “walked back” by Biden’s gaggle of minders, raising questions about whether Biden himself is the one making the decisions.

Then there was Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan. When reports of the trip began to circulate, so too did the speculations about why she was going at such an awful time. Did Biden approve of Pelosi’s trip, or was she going against his wishes? The latest reporting suggests it was the latter. If she had been backed by Biden, then, as Thomas Friedman put it, Biden would have been signing off on “something that is utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”. Instead, it seems that Biden was simply unable to stop Pelosi from doing whatever she wanted.

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What explains this potentially tragic comedy of errors? Perhaps, in part, it is a result of the Democrats’ desperate need to distinguish themselves from Trump. If Trump was unwilling to risk war over Taiwan, then Team Biden must be ready to go there. But wanting to come across as different is hardly a vision.

Trump’s personality made him unfit for office, and the events of January 6 have left a stain on America. But the Trump administration had some real foreign policy achievements under its belt, not least the breakthrough Abraham Accords. When Trump brags that neither the war in Ukraine nor the crisis over Taiwan would have happened if he had been re-elected, he is credible. For all his colourful personality, there really was a Trump domestic policy vision and a foreign policy doctrine.

The same cannot be said of his successor. A year on from the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden’s doctrine remains nebulous and disjointed, to the extent it doesn’t appear to exist at all. More and more, the Afghanistan disaster epitomises his entire administration — chaotic, ill-planned, and papered over with high-flown rhetoric that has little to do with the reality on the ground.

***

Editor’s note: This piece was written before Salman Rushdie was attacked on Friday — a subject which Ayaan will be addressing in her next column.

On Wednesday, while pundits were still helping the White House congratulate itself for killing the 71-year-old terrorist leader, China responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by launching a massive, four-day combined arms live fire exercise around the island. While the US broadcasts mixed signals about its commitment to defending Taiwan, Beijing has been absolutely clear that it is willing to go to war, and has now encircled the island in an unprecedented show of force.

The lesson of the past week could not be any clearer. The American ruling class has no sense of what role it is meant to play in world affairs. It acts with reckless senility, provoking rival powers while uncertain of its own aims. To distract from this underlying reality, it fixates on symbolically potent acts like the killing of al-Zawahiri. But for how long can this go on?

None of which is a reason to mourn for al-Zawahiri, if indeed he is really dead. This is at least the fourth report of his death over the last two decades, though the first time it has been announced by a US president. Surely the best time to have killed al-Zawahiri would have been when he came to the United States in 1993 on a Bay Area fundraising tour — the same year of the first al-Qaeda-directed World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people. But better late than never.

Assuming that the reports of his death are real, however, it would be prudent  to take the details with a grain of salt. After all, the initial details about the raid that killed al-Zawahiri’s predecessor, Osama Bin Laden, who had supposedly used his wife as a human shield, were later revealed to be false, the products of a manufactured narrative. The timing of the 2011 Bin Laden raid was no doubt connected to the exigencies of the intelligence business; it had a political dimension as well, taking place in the same year Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq.

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The circumstances around al-Zawahiri’s death raise a different set of questions. It appears that the al-Qaeda leader entered Afghanistan last August shortly after the chaotic US withdrawal and Taliban takeover of the country. He was staying in an upscale area of downtown Kabul, a short distance from where the US once housed its embassy, reportedly in a safe house owned by a senior aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. This is a significant detail because Sirajuddin, in addition to being the author of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, is the leader of the powerful Haqqani network, an outgrowth of the Haqqani dynastic clan, which has played a key role in Afghan politics for decades and whose patriarch, Jalaluddin, was once fêted by members of Congress as an anti-Soviet mujahideen commander. In addition to holding a place on Washington’s “specially designated global terrorist” list, Sirajuddin is also a member of the new Taliban government, serving as its acting interior minister.

When I arrived in Afghanistan in 2012 as a US Army officer, the Haqqani name was spoken of in grave tones. Operating from their stronghold in Paktia province, on Afghanistan’s treacherous southeastern frontier with Pakistan, the Haqqanis commanded an extended network of tribal loyalists, intelligence operatives, terrorist cells, and paramilitary forces. Under the leadership of Sirajuddin, they were kingmakers in Afghanistan’s fractious political scene and survived the two decades of US occupation by skillfully balancing relationships with al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban. Among soldiers, the Haqqanis were known for their skill at orchestrating complex terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan. In contrast with typical Taliban fighters, who were the country bumpkins of the Pashtun heartland, and whose attacks, while deadly, relied on conventional ambush tactics, the Haqqanis were more sophisticated and more lethal.

One fairly obvious conclusion to draw from the head of al-Qaeda being put up in downtown Kabul is that neither the Taliban nor the Haqqanis were overly concerned about a possible American response. But that is not the conclusion being drawn in Washington. Taking their cues from President Biden’s statement that the killing of al-Zawahiri is “proof that it’s possible to root out terrorism without being at war in Afghanistan”, foreign policy mandarins say the drone strike proves Washington’s “strategy” is working. Its success shows that the U.S. should rely more on “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capabilities — i.e. those which do not require large numbers of American troops on the ground to be effective — as the central pillar of national security policy.

In an article for the Daily Beast headlined, “Biden Keeps a Promise With His Zawahiri Strike,” David Rothkopf writes:

“The attack was more than just a strike against a longtime member of America’s most-wanted terrorist list. It was both a vindication of Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan and a demonstration of the effectiveness of Biden’s counterterrorism strategy.”

An NBC news article polishes up a different angle of the official narrative by publicising Biden’s extraordinary scrupulousness and the “surgical” nature of the attack. “The strike was so precise that it killed al-Zawahiri on a balcony without harming family members elsewhere in the house,” the article reports, citing (who else?) an anonymous Biden official. Among the story’s five different authors is Ken Dilanian, whose close relationship with the U.S. security establishment has included routinely submitting past articles to the CIA for review before they were published.

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Beyond simply cheering for the party in power, these narratives promote the idea that drone strikes are an effective strategy for destroying America’s enemies and keeping its citizens safe. “See,” say the foreign policy experts and their validators in the media, “this is how we should have done it all along. We never needed to invade Afghanistan — to say nothing of Iraq — and spend two decades nation-building in order to target al-Qaeda.”

But while they are right about the folly of nation-building, they are delusional if they think that counterterrorism represents anything new and improved in the US policy arsenal. Over-the-horizon capabilities have been a central and growing plank of American power for the past two decades. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the capabilities now being celebrated for their effectiveness and surgical precision are the very same methods employed last summer, when a different U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The official narrative about that attack, dubbed “Righteous Strike,” was that it had targeted Islamic State members who were transporting explosives and posed an imminent threat to American troops. That false narrative spread widely before the grim truth came out.

Over-the-horizon capabilities are a fine thing for a nation to have but they are simply a tool, not a strategy for achieving long-term peace. In reality, if counterterrorism worked as advertised, al-Qaeda would have collapsed years ago. “According to recent scholarship based on papers captured from Bin Laden’s hideout, the CIA’s drone campaign that targeted al-Qaeda between 2008 and 2013 devastated the core organisation, which was based in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” wrote Steve Coll in a New Yorker column published after al-Zawahiri’s death.

If it were possible for the US to drone strike its way to a lasting victory in the War on Terror, the war would already be won. But as Coll’s observation implies, the backdrop of the terrorist problem is the states which support them. Counterterrorism is great for generating publicity ops, lucrative contracts for the defence industry, and reliable sinecures for legions of experts. But in two decades of war, it was never able to address the fundamental reality of the Pakistani state’s support for al-Qaeda. Nor could it keep Afghanistan from falling right back into the hands of the Taliban.

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In the most important conflicts taking place today, in Ukraine and around Taiwan, America’s over-the-horizon tools are of limited use. Even the spectacle of notching new “kills” on the high-profile terrorist scoreboard seems to be losing its lustre. Much of the appeal of counterterrorism at this point, apart from promising to prevent more fruitless two-decade occupations, is that it is a self-perpetuating institution. The counterterrorism lobby is more powerful than ever inside Washington because it offers the appearance of a guiding strategic principle behind American power, where none actually exists.

As US leadership escalates confrontation with two nuclear powers in China and Russia, it cannot even define where its nation’s vital interests are at stake in those arenas. The long exercise in hunting down terrorist groups has been a diversion from the core responsibilities of statecraft: defining one’s relationship to other countries in a way that maximises the security and prosperity of the nation.

Can Pelosi articulate how her trip to Taiwan benefited Americans? In a bare room with no aides, could Biden convincingly explain what the US involvement in Ukraine is meant to accomplish? To avoid catastrophe, America needs leaders who can answer such basic questions, not more drones.

It’s easy to read Jeffrey Cohen’s account of being held hostage in a Texan synagogue at the weekend as an uplifting tale of bravery and accomplishment: it tells of a terrifying stand-off with a deranged, gun-wielding attacker, brought to an end after nearly 11 hours when a rabbi threw a chair at the assailant and managed to escape with two other hostages (another had been released earlier in the day).

Thankfully, the only person killed that day was the terrorist, 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram. Rabbi Charlie Cytron Walker had nothing but praise for the recent security training provided to the synagogue by the FBI and Colleyville Police Department. It had prepared them for the situation and saved their lives. Other residents spoke of how the community came together. The attack’s conclusion was deemed a triumph of humanity; it was, in effect, something to be celebrated.

And yet the truth couldn’t be more different. Yes, there is still much about the Akram that remains unclear: a debate is still raging over his motivations, and whether he was inspired by Islamist ideology or whether the state of his “mental health” is to blame.

But two conclusions can already be drawn — and both are deeply concerning. The first is that the attack should never have been allowed to happen; the second is that such acts of violence are likely to become more frequent.

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During the Obama years, terrorist attacks seemed almost routine. But for much of the past several years, we’ve seen their frequency decrease in the United States, largely thanks to the defeat of Muslim terror groups and the disillusionment of many young Muslims with radical Islam.

In that period, as Akram’s attack demonstrates, we have let our guard down. And the Islamists have noticed. They’ve taken this quiet time to regroup, raise money, recruit extensively, and grow stronger. It is classic Islamist dawa strategy.

Law enforcement is tight-lipped when it comes to confirming whether Akram fits into this narrative. But that should not prevent us from questioning how America became so complacent. How else could a suspected Islamist from the UK with connections to Tablighi Jammat enter the US without anyone blinking an eye?

Convicted criminals are usually denied entry to the US, but Akram was granted a tourist visa simply by lying on his application. With the stroke of pen, he erased his long criminal history, which included serving prison time, on three separate occasions, for harassment, theft and attacking a family member with a baseball bat. By ticking a box, he managed to expunge from history the fact that he had been under investigation by MI5 as a possible Islamist terrorist threat as recently as 2020. He was welcomed into America where he could travel freely and somehow allowed to purchase a gun.

Yet this is more than a failure of mere complacency; it is the clearest sign yet that the structures and institutions we had in place following 9/11 to counter Islamism have all but eroded.

This is largely down to a failure of leadership. To the world, the United States has spent the past decade nurturing an image of weakness and chaos. Common among jihadis is the idea that the American spirit is waning and Islam is ascending. Nothing could have bolstered this argument better than the Trump administration’s decision to make peace with the Taliban, and the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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Elsewhere, America’s political elite responded by further hamstringing their country: overseeing the politicisation of the very institutions responsible for counter-terrorism. Instead of directing our talent and resources towards justified threats, our agencies prefer to chase “domestic terrorists”, including those supposedly hiding out in school board meetings, and “white supremacists”, claiming that they represent “the most lethal threat to the homeland today”. The Obama administration even shifted away from the term counter-terrorism, instead preferring the vaguer term “countering violent extremism”. How can we expect anti-terror officials to do their job when “terrorism” itself has become a taboo word?

What makes this doubly concerning is that this problem is no longer confined to America. Rather, what we confront is a general crisis within Anglo-American societies, particularly within our respective intelligence communities. The attack may have unfolded in Tarrant County, Texas, but its seeds were sown in Blackburn.

There, British security services concluded that Akram did not pose a threat to society. There, the local community failed to speak up when he started to display multiple signs of radicalisation: he became estranged from his family, suddenly turned very religious, embraced Wahhabism, and travelled to Pakistan twice in the same year. For all their differences, the UK and the US have one thing in common: woefully and willingly unprepared anti-terror organisations.

With the chaos unfolding in Westminster right now, it seems unlikely that substantive change in Britain is on the horizon. But in the US, with midterm elections looming, and with a Congress more focused on the threat of Islamist terrorism, rebuilding the infrastructure needed to prevent terrorist attacks is within the realm of possibility. And given the bar is now so low that someone like Akram can enter the country, buy a gun and storm a synagogue, any change is likely to be an improvement.

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So yes, we should absolutely celebrate the fact that the rabbi and his congregants survived last weekend’s attack. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that Malik Faisal Akram was a one-off. Nor should we pay heed to those who over the weekend were so ready to downplay the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist ideology, as if Akram had picked a synagogue for his attack on a whim.

There are, I fear, many more like him out there. Both the US and the UK need to be more prepared. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

For many, the ethnicity and heritage of the only person facing charges in this case, Ali Harbi Ali, were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.

As someone who was born in Somalia, I find this absurd. Of course a suspect is not a murderer because he has a Somali background — and Ali is not a murderer until proven as such. But denouncing facts as racist — especially when the person in question was referred to Prevent, and police and security services believe he may have been inspired by al-Shabaab in Somalia — forces a dangerous ignorance on the public.

Yet it is just one of a number of fallacies that continue to dominate almost every discussion about Islamist-driven terrorism — fallacies that are promoted by both the media and British authorities. Indeed, it strikes me that our efforts to counter Islamist attacks are hindered by at least three other misconceptions: our insistence on describing a perpetrator as a “lone wolf”, our obsession with online self-radicalisation, and the idea that “all extremisms are created equal”.

Take that first fallacy. As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, I suspect numerous victims of Islamist extremism might be alive today, if those in charge of preventing terrorism recognised that Islamist extremists are anything but lone wolves.

In a liberal society, it is appealing to think of suspects of Islamist terror as solitary actors. As a matter of principle, we uphold the importance of individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, while our judicial system assumes that individuals are responsible for their actions. We also recognise the importance of not maligning an entire community because of the extremist views of a few of their fellow believers. This is particularly crucial when the historical relationship between a particular minority and their new country is fraught with memories of colonialism.

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But while individuals responsible for terrorist attacks may conduct their attacks alone, they still emerge out of communities or networks of like-minded individuals, whether in-person or online. They learn from teachers, imams or instructors the radical ideas that inspire their violence. This is not to say that their entire family or community is extremist — only that these individuals find and are exposed to people who are. Little is known about the background of the murder suspect, Ali, but we can be certain that if found guilty, he would not have plunged a knife into a total stranger, possibly picked at random, wholly of his own accord. Someone or some group would have inspired these actions.

Since last Friday, we’ve heard from a number of people who reportedly knew Ali, all of whom have expressed shock at his alleged crime. Yet it seems hugely unlikely that no one in his immediate circle would have picked up on any extremist tendencies. After all, the Somalian communities are very social. Unlike in traditional Western families, where individuals live an atomised life within an atomised society, a Somali family typically lives together in one household, where everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.

Gossip is a way of life. Solitude is not an option, even more so during the pandemic when families not only lived together but were home more often. It is likely, therefore, that key signs of radicalisation — a shift in language, withdrawal from society, increased frequency of praying and attending mosque — would be noticed by various family members.

When that does happen, you might expect a person’s family to become more involved, to pull them back into their community. But that isn’t always the case. Imagine, for example, that you are a family member of a potentially radicalised individual from a highly tight-knit community. You notice something of concern — but might it be best to keep quiet? Are you a sinner if you report your brother to a programme led by non-Muslims? What does it mean for your relationship with God and the afterlife? What kind of traitor would report their own blood to the authorities?

Or perhaps you are just a non-Muslim colleague or friend of the individual. You may notice a change in behaviour, but are you really going to go forward and report them, with the possibility of being labelled a racist or an Islamophobe? Who would report a potentially innocent person, just for observing their religion?

Lone wolves, then, do not come out of nowhere. They are inspired by other radicals and they are noticed by their community. The problem is that the community then keeps quiet.

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A similar fallacy looms over our understanding of online radicalisation, which does not occur in a silo, between the individual and their computer screen. The individual has to be susceptible, in a place of vulnerability, where Islamic radicalism can easily set in.

Though there is much about Ali that we are yet to learn, we do know that his father was Harbi Ali Kullane, a former government official in Somalia. Since the attack, reports have presented Kullane’s Twitter profile as a testament to assimilation, displaying his support for Captain Tom and the England football team. It has also been reported that, while working in Somalia, he faced threats from al-Shabaab.

And yet I suspect his attitude to his new country is more nuanced than has been presented. It is striking, for example, that not a single news outlet has flagged a tweet by Kullane from 2017, in which he suggests: “the 5-pointed star [on the Somali flag] represents the aspiration of a nation and the misery inflicted by British colonialism. Let’s not sugar coat this #Somalia.” Given that Kullane moved to the UK in the Nineties, his comment suggests an antipathy to Britain that has so far been ignored.

The last fallacy that must be confronted is the belief that all forms of extremism are created equal and should be treated as such. Under the British counter-terrorism Prevent programme, Islamism is lumped together with other forms of extremism, such as far-Right extremism, and handled with a similar approach. But while Right-wing extremism is a threat that should not be downplayed, its causes and motivations are totally unrelated to radical Islamists. They should be distinct and handled separately.

The only way to prevent Islamist terrorist attacks is to understand the lexicon of the Islamists. It is vital to understand the historic heroes that inspire them, the hadiths that speak to them, the myths and legends that motivate them, and the materials that are put into their hands. It is important to know not just the history of Islam, but also the history of the nation that is connected to the radicalised individual.

This kind of specialisation is not possible when so many in the UK cry Islamophobia at every turn. The only way to ask family and community members to come forward and report potentially radicalised individuals is to win their confidence. Individuals have to feel that they can safely approach the authorities without repercussion. They also deserve to know that the situation will be handled by someone who deeply understands the issues at hand. As Nik Adams, a counter-terrorism police officer, explained brilliantly, we need people who can recognise “how significant the seemingly insignificant might be”.

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Given the ineffectiveness of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, and the blinkered approach to reporting since Sir David’s murder, that will be an uphill struggle. But it is not impossible: Prevent is undergoing an independent review, led by the capable William Shawcross, that will report in December and produce suggestions on how it can be improved.

More importantly, I believe that, by and large, the Islamic terrorist narrative is waning. al-Qaeda is a skeleton of what it was two decades ago, while the spectre of ISIS continues to serve as a real-life deterrent to what living under a caliphate requires. Even the Muslim Brotherhood narrative is stale and petering out. Yes, the Taliban may have taken control of Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamism in Africa remains deeply concerning and often ignored. But taken in its entirety, radical Islam does not have the same potency it once did.

So even if Sir David’s death is proven to be a terrorist incident, the defeat of radical Islam in Britain is still attainable. But achieving that requires us to bin the fallacies regurgitated after every attack. If we don’t, the pattern of seemingly random terrorist violence will persist.

As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.

Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.

In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:

“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”

Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”

But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”

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This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:

“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”

Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”

Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”

In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”

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This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”

Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.

As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.

Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”

No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.

All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.

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Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.

Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”

But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.

Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.

For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”

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So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?

Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.

Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.

It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.

The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.

It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”

Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.

Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.

Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.

But the world has turned sideways in a single generation. By 2020, the US had a $3-trillion-dollar budget deficit, and our share of the global economy had decreased to 25%, in large part due to the rise of China. Nearly 7,000 Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than double the number killed on 9/11. In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, and on 6 January this year the US Capitol was stormed by an enraged mob. To the broader world, the American colossus was looking a lot more like an American basket case.

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The results of American hubris have been mixed at best for Iraq and Afghanistan. A conservative estimate is that more than 200,000 Iraqis and 250,000 Afghans have died since 2001 as a result of the invasions. Iraq’s democracy is shaky, having undergone an existential fright with the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s. Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule, just as it was in 2001. America came to liberate, but in the wake of imperial conquest, the natives suffered through corruption, factionalism and civil war. Due to our all-volunteer army and reflexive recourse to deficit spending, most Americans did not experience the wars in a visceral or indirect manner. All the while, viscera were being splattered across the streets of Baghdad and Kabul as young men blew themselves up, inspired by a religious fanaticism in turn aggravated by American occupation.

Notably, while the consequences for the Iraqis and Afghans have been tragic, our social, intellectual and political elite have suffered no professional repercussions for their incompetence. On 2 November, 2001 Friedman asked us to “give war a chance”. Twenty years later, he continues to opine for The New York Times, pulling down a salary of $350,000 per year at a time when journalism as a profession is collapsing.

Goldberg, whose New Yorker piece burnished the humanitarian need for the overthrow of Hussein, was appointed editor of The Atlantic in 2016. Packer wrote a book, Assassin’s Gate, where he chronicles his disillusionment with the war. This was sufficient to maintain a sinecure at The New Yorker until 2018, when he moved to The Atlantic to work under his former colleague Goldberg. Frum has had a more chequered career, but that had little to do with his position on the War on Terror, and everything to do with his scepticism of the Republican stance on healthcare reform in 2010, illustrating the true red-lines in American politics.

Frum is now more often speaking to a centre-left rather than a centre-right audience (though still identifying as a conservative), but he is still comfortably ensconced in the American establishment. Similarly, Kristol has converted into a “Never Trump” “Biden Republican,” and is a member of good standing of the “Resistance”. His publication, The Bulwark, receives funding from centre-left foundations. Even George W. Bush, who was once a hate-figure for the Left, is now being rehabilitated. The man who unleashed two disastrous wars and whose decisions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands is now celebrated for his paintings of immigrants.

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Bush’s one-time viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also taken up painting and become a ski instructor in his leisured semi-retirement. Meanwhile, his hawkish lieutenant Dick Cheney is now well regarded for his support of gay marriage, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz, is garnering respect and accolades from Democrats for her anti-Trump views following the 2020 election. Condeleezza Rice, also an anti-Trump Republican, returned to academia, but has also become a pop culture phenomenon, and has now been tapped to make guest appearances on The View.

The soft-glow Cheney rehabilitation is emblematic of the primacy of domestic political concerns in today’s American cultural landscape. Just a decade ago, he was being pilloried for his frank defence of torture. Today his anti-Trump stance gets more weight when determining whether he’s one of the “good ones” or “bad ones”. Despite how much foreign policy dominated American politics in the early 2000’s, the rest of the world has faded from view over the past decade. The 2016 and 2020 Democrat presidential candidates were both supporters of the Iraq invasion and hailed from the party’s more hawkish wing, Hillary Clinton being a major proponent of American intervention in Libya.

Under Trump, many conventional narratives surrounding national security and foreign policy flipped. Liberals and the intelligentsia came to love the CIA and FBI, and cast a sceptical eye on foreign powers like Russia. Kristol, the architect of the neoconservative intellectual project in the 2000s, has now become an icon of the anti-Trump faction, even lauded by mainstream liberals. Establishment intellectuals even now see Bush as a bulwark of American democracy, a contrast to Trump’s strongman tendencies.

It turns out that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Despite a decade of international adventurism in the 2000s that extended at lower wattage into the 2010s, the US remained a nation apart, focused on its own concerns. The pundits and politicians whose blunders in the early 2000s had grave consequences for nations far away suffered few ill consequences for their disastrous prognostications, short-sighted decisions and uninformed arguments.

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Bush is now allowed to be the pro-immigrant painter ex-president, not the executive who authorised extraordinary rendition and whose decisions pulverised two nations for a generation. Kristol’s legacy may not be as organiser of Bush’s imperial braintrust, but as the rebel against the Trump regime. Friedman remains one of the best-paid journalists in the country, while Goldberg is now editor of one of the nation’s most venerable magazines. Frum and Cheney have not changed their fundamental politics, but are now embraced by the liberal establishment thanks to their strident anti-Trump position.

Never mind that Cheney’s objection to Trumpism is rooted in the latter’s deviation from the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s. The period in the middle of that decade when foreign policy loomed large as a polarising issue in partisan politics was the exception and not the rule, and the collateral damage abroad of American adventurism is out of sight and out of mind. The current President supported the Iraq War, while Kristol is now a Biden-defender against even the gentlest conservative criticisms.

Twenty years down the line, the American elite is somewhat chagrined to be reminded of the arrogance and ignorance they showed in the wake of 9/11. But they are the same elite that they always were, because their sinecures are ultimately yoked to the whims of domestic politics, not the horrors that American enthusiasms unleashed abroad. Once obtained, a position in the pundit and political elite is rarely subject to the vicissitudes of meritocracy. America is ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error in 2021, just as it was in 2001 on the eve of the 9/11 terror attack. In that sense, it was a day that changed nothing.

That was some time ago. More recently, the last time the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, in 1996, they found a previous president, Mohammed Najibullah, at the UN compound in Kabul. He, too, had been a puppet leader, supported by the Soviets. The Taliban seized him and tortured him and his brother to death, castrating him at some point. Their naked bodies were dragged through the street and hanged outside the presidential palace, as a warning to the populace. As a considered insult, funeral prayers for Najibullah were forbidden in Kabul.

On August 16^th this year, the American president Joe Biden gave a televised speech justifying his decision to withdraw his troops. Much of it was devoted to complaining about the conduct of the Afghans — the ones who had been left high and dry. “Afghanistan’s leaders gave up and fled the country,” he claimed. It would have been true with the addition of the word “some” — Hamid Karzai, for instance, stayed where he was, in Kabul. And if the president, Ashraf Ghani, took the opportunity to seek safety in the UAE, it may have been the memory of Najibullah’s grisly fate that encouraged him to flee. Or the fate of Shah Shujah. Biden, on the other hand, appeared entirely ignorant of how things go and have gone in Afghanistan. Ignorance is the general condition of many anti-imperialists in the West, and Afghanistan has paid heavily for it.

I am a novelist by profession. About twenty-five years ago, I found myself inexplicably possessed by a subject. I couldn’t understand it. I had very little interest in historical novels. I had never been to Afghanistan. But there was no alternative: I felt under a compulsion to write a novel about the First Afghan War.

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The British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, replacing the Emir, Dost Mohammed (who fled) with Shah Shujah. Two years later, forces loyal to Dost Mohammed routed the British, killing almost all of them on their retreat. Dost Mohammed regained his throne and kept it.

Nobody, in the late 1990s, could understand why I was writing this. I could only shrug. I could see that something important was happening in Afghanistan while I was writing, but I submitted to the compulsion rather than investigate parallels. Very strangely indeed, at one point I had the unarguable conviction that my hero, in 1839, should look up into the sky and see jet planes flying westward. It made no sense, and it had to be done.

The novel was finished, and the bound proof was delivered. It was September 10^th, 2001. The next day I switched the television on, and understood what The Mulberry Empire had wanted to say.

At this time, I’d also been writing a weekly column for the Independent, and though I seemed like an unserious person to the editors, they occasionally let me write something about Afghanistan if there was nothing else going on. These are curious to read now.

I wrote that, when the Taliban destroyed the 6^th century statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan in March 2001, it was a harbinger of much worse acts of destruction. After the war started, mindful of Dost Mohammed’s tactics in the 1830s, it was absolutely clear to me that the Taliban had usefully melted into the mountains to regroup patiently. In an interview in March 2002, I complained with comic exaggeration that rather than an imperialist project, the West in Afghanistan was “going there for three months, sending sandwiches and then leaving again, which is a recipe for disaster”. Quite soon after, I wrote that in the end of our Afghan adventure, “when it comes to the point, we can evacuate in shame and dishonour”. And so it has proved.

All this was perfectly obvious to a fairly lazy novelist sitting in South London. Why the sequence of events has proved so astonishing to every Western commentator and politician is an interesting question, and unlike many things said to be an interesting question, this one has a fairly easy answer. They don’t know anything.

This is not much of an exaggeration, as Biden’s amazement at Ghani running for safety instantly shows. What has primarily driven all political decisions in the absence of understanding is something universally agreed upon. Imperialism was a very bad thing. No-one must ever be able to describe us, now, as imperialists. We must “start a conversation about Empire” — since this demand came fifty years after Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica was a bestseller, this did not quite mean what it seemed to.

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There was plenty of very interesting work being done on empire, but not much of it seemed to enter into the “conversation” — neither Srinath Raghavan’s exceptional study of India’s transition from empire through the experience of World War II, nor Amartya Sen’s lucid understanding of how Empire both shaped and went on restricting India.

Instead, a soothing bromide like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland was much preferred by the lumpenintelligentsia, however ill-informed or misleading. Sanghera’s approach to his subject was summed up by his account of the “brutal truth” that the Koh-i-Noor diamond ended up in the Crown Jewels after being seized from Ranjit Singh. He fails to mention that Ranjit Singh’s family had owned it for all of 36 years, having seized it from Shah Shujah as the price of hospitality. Still, the evils of imperialism emerge consolingly from the half story Sanghera tells.

What lies behind Biden’s decision is a horror of what people might think of us. This is never going to lead to a stable position. People might think that an unstable and wicked foreign state needs to be dealt with. People might also think that putting things right by moving in and running is wicked imperialism. The end result is that the West decides to move in; after a while, they get bored and nervous of bien pensant opinion; their President declares that twenty years’ presence is a “forever war” and the only solution is to run away, and anyway, look how expensive it’s been. We tried to get them to do stuff our way for, like, forever, and my God they just wouldn’t. Their fault, obviously.

Since there is clearly no appetite for an open-ended imperial commitment, with a viceroy in the Bala Hissar, the only realistic option would have been never to have engaged in the first place.

“Hang in there, sisters,” a groovy Greek commentator advised the women of Kabul last week, and that seems to be about the limit of our interest. The old imperialists, appalling as they were to our eyes, at least took the trouble to find out about these cultures and talk to them. Sathnam Sanghera sneers at the limit of engagements of the imperialists who were to be found “dining on curry and arak, chewing betel and smoking hookahs, forsaking beef, donning dhotis and growing moustaches.”

I doubt Sanghera’s knowledge of Pushto and Dari is as confident as Alexander Burnes’s, however, or his Sanskrit up to that of William Jones. I suspect, on a lighter level, that those imperialists who dined on curry were a bit better informed than the commentator in the Washington Post who, from an impeccably bien pensant position, informed his readers this week that Indian food is “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based on one spice”.

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We are never, now, going to be able to have an honest conversation about Empire. It would now be quite impossible to say on paper, for instance, that Fiji tried to join the British Empire in 1852 and was turned down flat. Or to talk about the establishment of the medical school in Agra in the 1850s. Or to suggest, as I did, that the heroic ability to fight off imperial annexation, whether in the 1830s or the 2000s, may carry something of a cost.

The current confused state of affairs is that we are perfectly certain that wrong is being done elsewhere, and something must be done, and, also, it would be terribly wrong to do anything but run away in order to put that wrong right, or at any rate excuse ourselves from being called names.

I dare say that the Taliban are going to settle in for an extended period of rule after a certain amount of initial bloodshed, just like Dost Mohammed on his glorious return. There was always considerable tension between them — parochial, tribal, Afghanistan-focussed — and the sophisticated internationalists of al-Qaeda they found themselves hosting. They might not want to go down that path again, and the West will stick to mouthing platitudes and leaving the men, women and children of Afghanistan in the situation they find themselves in.

What’s the alternative? Learn something about the long history and culture of those men, women and children? Talk to them in their own languages? That’s never going to catch on.

But it’s coming true with Biden.

And historians will never stop wondering what could have induced the 46th president of the United States to commit such a grievous error.

Is it the naïveté of a politician lacking any sense of history or tragedy, the one who took the Taliban at their word when they assured us of their peaceful intentions in Doha in February 2020?

Is it the cynicism of a president already looking ahead to his re-election and pandering to those in swing-states who are said to be fed up with “endless wars”?

Is it an effect of a swing of the pendulum between the four major poles of American diplomacy laid out by Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonianism and its democratic messianism; Jeffersonianism and its hard and fast isolationism; Jacksonianism and its reflex to give tit for tat, but only when US interests appear directly targeted; and Hamiltonianism and the formulation, so dear to France’s Montesquieu, that America’s only truly vital interests were those of peaceful commerce?

Or is this a new pole altogether? One pioneered by Barack Obama in August 2013, when he declined to enforce the red line that he had said would be irretrievably crossed if the Syrian leader resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens? The one at work when, without warning or any shred of moral or strategic interest, Donald Trump abandoned his country’s Kurdish allies, first in Iraq when he allowed the pro-Iranian militias to invade Kirkuk, then in Syria when he allowed Erdogan’s murderous proxies to enter Rojava? The one brought to its culmination in the present Afghan rout, this abject display of open desertion being broadcast live to the world and punctuated, as I write, by scenes of panic and chaos at Kabul airport that could easily be mistaken for those in Saigon in 1975?

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Is it, in other words, the consolidation of a trend that I first sensed almost twenty years ago, when writing American Vertigo and later developed in The Empire and the Five Kings? Gone the great power, which has jettisoned its dreams of exceptionalism, its ambition to be a shining city upon a hill! Broken, the gracious Virgilian thread that made the invention of America a new Aeneid whose mission was no longer to rebuild Troy in Rome or Rome on a grand scale in Europe, but to reinvent Europe with improvements! Onward toward a new pre-Columbian order in which the old empire, in retreat, no longer counts and makes way for the latter-day reincarnations of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Persia, Great Russia, Imperial China, and, as here, the new Ummah made possible by a radical misreading of the Koran!

It is too early to know for certain.

And each of these explanations is at least partially true.

But the time has come for a review of accounts.

And that review shows that what the most pessimistic of us feared must be booked not just as a loss but as an abomination in three parts:

1. The wolves are through the gate

They are hunting down the supporters of republican government and institutions, as well as my journalist friends from Tolo News.

They are sending women back to their fabric prisons after many thousands of them had tasted dignity and become accustomed to gender equality and the freedom to show their faces.

Sharia is the law of the land.

Lists of suspects, banned and “wanted” people are being posted at the entrances to neighbourhoods, sounding an ominous clarion call.

Islamic tribunals will soon be operating at full speed, with their absurd crimes and atrocious punishments.

And the scenes of stoning that have been filmed over the past few months in remote villages will be reenacted live in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, sites of high civilisation where the descendants of horsemen and poets had begun to embrace the democratic dream.

A people are in agony.

The triumph of a strain of barbarism that, twenty years ago, the great democracies and their Afghan allies easily defeated and whose legions of rabble on motorbikes are no more formidable today than they were back then.

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And of naïveté, when the American administration, speaking through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adds credulity to dishonour by accepting the Taliban’s word that it is ready to “protect” civilians seeking to be evacuated from the country while offering dubious evidence of good intentions.

Worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

And, worse than a mistake, it is a stain.

A stain on the term of Joe Biden, whose first dramatic error this is.

But also, in a greater sense, this stain dishonours the modern conscience. It will take a long time for that conscience to forget this failure, this shame.

2. And what of the United States?

Already devalued by the sacrifice of the Kurds on the altar of appeasement, first toward Iran (the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq) and then toward Turkey (the Kurds in Syria), the word of the United States is suddenly worth nothing.

Imagine you are a Ukrainian in Donbass battling, in the trenches of Luhansk or Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries in the pay of the Kremlin.

An Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh who has learned that the resentment of those pining for a return of the Ottoman Empire and denying the genocide of their ancestors knows no bounds or limitations.

Or a Taiwanese, South Korean or even a Japanese sensing the nearby presence of the iron jaw of Chinese totalitarianism just waiting to bite.

To say nothing of the Balts, the Poles, the Czechs — of Europeans, in other words — who had been living, like the generation of the founders of Europe, in the belief that venerable old treaties protected them and ensured their security.

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What do they all think of this self-inflicted Saigon? This geopolitical suicide? How can they avoid ruminating on the betrayal and massacre of Carthage’s Punic allies, as recounted by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, when confronted with this spectacle, this disarray in a diplomatic system that has made the inexplicable choice, just weeks before the anniversary of September 11, of returning Afghanistan to the terrorists on a silver platter and allowing them to build a nest for the vipers of the new Al-Qaeda and their ilk? When confronted, yes, with the direct, deliberate and slow-motion abandonment of a people who, like the Kurds, were our rampart against radical Islam and protected the world from terrorism? Under the circumstances, how is it possible not to conclude that if Putin, Erdogan or Xi got it in his head to fill part of the void created by the American retreat there would be no one to oppose him?

Dizzying.

An Afghan Anschluss.

Munich on all fronts.

And even if one must be wary of comparing the incomparable, this is truly terrible.

3. But then, there is Panjshir

There remains, living in his homeland of Panjshir, one young man, Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who, in his day, embodied the struggle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and who was assassinated two days before September 11.

A few days ago, just a few hours after the fall of Kabul, the young Ahmad Massoud was able to elude the hired killers sent to track him down.

Knowing that if they captured him, he might suffer the same fate as his illustrious father, he did exactly what his father had done, a little less than twenty-five years ago, after the first fall of Kabul, when he managed to get hold of one of the last old helicopters that the Taliban had not yet taken over and took refuge in his bastion in Panjshir, above the Shomali Plain, to organise the Afghan resistance.

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He wrote to me from his native village on Monday (16 August), several hours after rejoining his commanders.

“We find ourselves,” he wrote, “in the situation of Europe in 1940.”

The debacle is complete, he continued.

The spirit of collaboration is all around us.

Subjugation is closing in with sound and fury.

As Kabul groans, as the villages of the north and south are put in chains, vengeance is unfurling over our wounded land.

But despite reversal and even catastrophe, all is not lost, he told me.

With my Mujahideen, I intend to resume the struggle.

I call on all free women and men in the world, friends of Afghanistan old and young, to join us in spirit.

I call on all free fighters from all over the country, whatever their origin or ethnicity, to come to our valleys.

Already, he continued, groups of brave citizens are moving to the front with their creed, their bravery, and their antique rifles and grenade launchers.

I welcome them!

They will be — we will be — the living faces of the Resistance, and, soon enough, of the counteroffensive.

Free Afghanistan has lost Kabul, but it has not lost the war.

Massoud’s words were the words of the Spanish republicans in 1936.

Of Czech president Beneš in 1939 and of Alija Izetbegović, in 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, when he gave me a dramatic message to pass on to French president François Mitterrand.

Almost word for word, they are the words of General de Gaulle’s radio address to his defeated countrymen in June 1940, broadcast from London, in which he urged them not to submit but to continue to fight.

Except that the Afghans were betrayed, the young Massoud pointed out. Betrayed but not defeated. And they were not defeated because their leadership, their generals, did not even take them into battle.

* * *

I know this young man, just as I knew his father.

I have done numerous video interviews in the mountains of Panjshir, where, for a year, Massoud has been quietly preparing for the worst and stockpiling arms, equipment and supplies, as his father had done.

I trust him.

I believe him when he says he inherited from his father the taste for freedom and the instinct of fighting to defend it.

I believe him when he insists that he has no choice and that the fight is now ineluctably his, body and soul.

I believe that when he issues a call for all free Afghans who love their country and reject servitude, whether living in Afghanistan or abroad, to join him, he is not only sincere but credible.

At my initiative, France’s President Macron received him at the Elysée Palace on April 5, 2021.

I was present at that meeting, where the best of France appeared to have a rendezvous with an heir to the noblest anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And I am convinced that, in the new Great Game that lies ahead, it is this young man whom France, Britain and the rest of Europe will have to support.

In this area of the world, he is the embodiment of the future and of hope.

It is more dispiriting, from a British perspective, to realise that our own elites are, if anything, even worse. Observing the efforts of backbench Conservative MPs to summon up interest in a crusade to defend the Kabul government’s writ on a country where its own regional governors and security forces are either surrendering en masse to the Taliban or actively defecting to their side is concerning enough. When we see our defence minister doing the same, we should be worried.

As I begin writing this article, Kabul’s sphere of influence barely extends to the city limits; whether it will extend that far by the time I’ve finished is doubtful. President Ghani has fled the country; the Taliban are inside the presidential palace. There is no Afghan state left to defend. There is no Afghan army to support. And even if there were, given the British Army’s total inability to pacify one single Afghan province, Helmand, with the constant support of American air power that will no longer exist by the end of this month, it is far beyond our capacity even to dream of doing so. It is no good saying something must be done, after twenty failed years of trying everything. The Afghan war is over, and we lost.

Equally, the meaningless noises being emitted by Labour’s leadership that somehow the UK can gather key stakeholders around a table and hammer out a solution that is distinct from Taliban victory are simply gibberish of the highest order. The Taliban is already doing so, negotiating the surrender of the Kabul government’s military and administrative functionaries through the mediation of tribal elders and religious clerics, and are doing so far more effectively than Lisa Nandy will ever be capable of.

Indeed, the central fact of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan over the past two weeks, under-emphasised though it may be by the solipsistic tone of Western discourse, is precisely how little fighting has been involved. The Taliban has taken over provinces one after the other with barely a shot being fired. When even long-time anti-Taliban leaders like the veteran warlord Ismail Khan, who once ruled the western region of Herat like a medieval king, are meekly submitting to their rule, or even being deployed to Kabul to negotiate the Government’s surrender on the Taliban’s behalf, the ability of even such diplomatic titans as Starmer’s front bench to change the outcome of the war must be firmly ruled out.

If anything, the nature of the Taliban takeover offers glimpses of how they may approach their second period of rule. Their emphasis on seizing power, in these final stages, through negotiation rather than open conflict, accords well with traditional Afghan, particularly Pashtun, systems of dispute settlement.

In fact, the nature of the transfer of power elicits many parallels with the newish social-scientific sub-discipline of rebel governance studies, which aims to unsettle the Hobbesian norms dominant in International Relations theory which hold that only states can provide stable governance, and that non-state actors necessarily leave anarchy and violence in their wake.

This is not so: a burgeoning crop of academic literature focusing on rebel governance in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East highlights how, in fact, non-state actors across the world win popular support or at least acquiescence through a variety of methods, including the provision of services such as justice and dispute resolution, medical services, sharing of power through local government and appeals to traditional or other forms of moral authority not open to either the central state or external intervening powers.

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As it happens, I’m currently engaged in PhD research looking at rebel governance in Northeast Syria manifest by the Kurdish-led, radical Left-wing Democratic Union Party. The initial Taliban effort, despite their coming from entirely the opposite ideological pole, strongly suggests the utility of this approach in divining what Taliban 2.0 rule may look like for Afghanistan. Firstly, as already noted, the Taliban’s recourse to mediation through pillars of traditional moral and political authority like the clergy and tribal leaders in seizing power supports observations social scientists have derived from fieldwork in Afghanistan.

The counterinsurgency, or COIN doctrine, that so enamoured American generals and their British military hangers-on in the early and mid-2000s, held that external intervening powers could “lend” legitimacy to the embattled central state through infrastructural and other projects, which led, in Afghanistan’s case, to ambitious and ultimately fruitless showpiece schemes like the British Army’s escorting of equipment for a hydroelectric dam across Taliban-held Helmand.

Yet fieldwork in Afghanistan especially shows the precise opposite: the dependency on external powers taints the central government it is intended to support in the eyes of traditional rural populations, who are generally unsupportive of foreign occupations. COIN doctrine is based on a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of political legitimacy: local actors, embedded within and drawn from the ranks of local populations, will almost always be able to outcompete both the central state and even the most well-meaning and idealistic of colonial administrators in the battle for hearts and minds.

Already, the Taliban have issued numerous proclamations assuring the administrative functionaries of what we must now call the former government of amnesty: captured soldiers are being released, surrendered regional governors escorted back to Kabul, and bank workers, street cleaners, school teachers and traffic police told to resume their work — with some exceptions. Female bank tellers have, apparently, been ordered home in Herat, and replaced with their male relatives; female school teachers told they are only allowed to continue working if they don the chador, and their female pupils the hijab. Taliban governance in its second iteration is likely to be as restrictive for women as it was in its first.

This does not necessarily dampen the group’s legitimacy across the country; indeed, in the conservative rural provinces it may well enhance it. Yet in any case, the United States did not enter Afghanistan to advance the rights of women: if that was the West’s overriding concern, it would not have helped topple the previous communist regime, for whom gender equality was a major cause.

The cause of advancing gender equality in Kabul or Herat or Mazar-i-Sharif is a noble one, yet if the downstream consequence of enabling women’s rights in the cities is CIA-backed death squads murdering teenage boys in their village homes at night, the moral calculus is less clear. Biden, like Trump before him, has made the conclusion that the costs are not worth the benefits. Whether, once Taliban rule is secured, both international and local pressure can salvage some of the gains made for Afghan women is an open question  There is, at this point, no other alternative policy in any case. We shall see.

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This is not to underplay the brutality the Taliban are capable of. Working in Herat in 2014, I met and interviewed harmless Afghan peasants who had their fingers amputated for the crime of voting in the country’s democratic elections, part of the Taliban campaign to dissuade ordinary Afghans, through fear, of engaging with the rival central government. Already we have seen Taliban fighters summarily execute members of government-backed militias they accuse of atrocities against captured Taliban, and they have announced that there will be no mercy for either the country’s erstwhile president Ghani or the Uzbek warlord Marshal Dostum, both of whom, in any case, seem to have already fled the country.

Yet as the rebel governance literature shows, most violence occurs when control of a country is contested between two forces of more or less equal reach: once firm dominance is established by either party, local legitimacy tends to be achieved by amnesties in exchange for submitting to the victor’s authority, a process which we see occur in civil war after civil war. In any case, it must be noted that the measured application of brutality as often affords local legitimacy as it erodes it. The Taliban began, after all, as a local protest movement against the sexual abuse of young boys by warlord militia commanders, who they then hanged from tank barrels to local acclaim.

But the Taliban doesn’t just seek local legitimacy: for their rule to thrive they also need international legitimacy, and though it is very early days, much of their recent output seems designed to secure it. They have already reassured both China and Russia that they have no desire to export disorder beyond their borders, and are likely to be rewarded with recognition, and even investment, once they take Kabul.

For the Taliban to secure recognition from the European Union, which is keen to either continue or resume the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers from within its borders, it will be necessary to avoid the ethnic and sectarian persecutions that marred their previous term of rule. Already, we have seen the Taliban assure Shia worshippers that they will be allowed to worship openly under Taliban protection, and have appointed an ethnic Hazara governor for the Shia ethnic Hazara Bamiyan region, where they have taken control, so far, without firing a shot.

Their seizure of power first focussed on the the Dari and Uzbek-speaking strongholds of the Northern Alliance that had long resisted their rule, with the result that they now control more of the country than they did on 9/11. Minorities with long histories of resistance against and persecution by the Taliban will naturally fear what will come next: yet if the price of international recognition from external powers is delegation of local governance to ethnic minority leaders — as we are already seeing — and the avoidance of senseless killing for the sake of it, then there is every chance that this is what will result.

The present-day Taliban has already shown itself as a sophisticated and competent diplomatic actor on both the world and local stage: it is far from certain that they are so wedded to killing that they will forego the lavish reconstruction money certain to head their way if they can avoid it.

As for recognition by the United States, it will surely come in time: the Taliban were welcome diplomatic interlocutors before 9/11, and their campaign against their mutual enemy the Islamic State, which will now be pursued with all the American weaponry they have captured from the collapsing Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, will eventually make them a useful, if distant de facto partner.

It is strange to see an American foreign policy establishment which urges American engagement or even support for Syrian jihadist factions ideologically indistinct from the Taliban so distraught at the outcome in Afghanistan. If a qualified outreach can be made to even former al-Qaeda factions in Syria, including ones led by veterans of the Afghan jihad deployed by the al-Qaeda leader himself, on the basis that they promise not to attack the West, then it is difficult to see why the same logic cannot be applied further from the West’s shores.

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Whether or not the Taliban will continue to provide a haven for the al-Qaeda leadership is another question: but America’s notional ally Pakistan already does, with little censure. In any case, as in northwestern Syria, the United States retains the capability to assassinate senior al-Qaeda figures through carefully targeted drone strikes with minimal collateral damage, and with far less costs involved than in the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

So, at this stage, it looks like we are observing the dying days, even hours, of the American phase of the Afghan War. We must hope that the end of Afghanistan’s more than forty years of civil conflict are also drawing to a close. Afghanistan will still need Western support for reconstruction, the financial lures of which ought to be used to salvage what can be salvaged of the genuine advances for human rights made over the past two decades across the government-controlled portions of the country.

Whether the Taliban leadership, in Doha or in Pakistan, can maintain effective enough control of their fighters on the ground, buoyed by victory, to prevent a repeat of the urban fighting that destroyed Kabul in the 1990s is now the most pressing question; whether the assurances of amnesty and cooperation the Taliban leadership are giving its defeated opponents can be trusted, or whether they will revert to totalitarian excess, is the next.

Yet if the initial signs of Taliban political outreach to its conquered enemy are sustained over time, then the results might be similar to the 2001 offer they made to hand over Bin Laden for trial and engage in power-sharing negotiations, which the Americans rebuffed. Perhaps some Western leader, somewhere, will learn something from all this: from the evidence so far, that remains doubtful. But either way, whatever happens in Afghanistan now is up to Afghans to decide.