What after the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri.

When on February 29, 2020 the administration headed by the then US President Donald Trump signed a peace agreement with the Taliban at a ceremony held in Doha, the capital of Qatar, the US team led by Zalmay Khalilzad made a number of assumptions. Among the four, the most important was that the Taliban was committed to reduce the level of violence in Afghanistan. The insurgent group would not seek to gain ground in the battle it was waging against the government troops, which were aided by the US. The Taliban would not provide safe havens to any terrorist group that was involved in carrying out operations against targets outside the country's borders. And, ultimately following some concessions made by President Ashraf Ghani who had by then governed the country for more than six years, the Taliban would seek to become partners in governing Afghanistan. None of these expectations were met.

A year and a half later, when Ashraf Ghani fled from Kabul after the US had decided to pull out of the country, the Taliban lost no time in moving into the presidential palace. That was on August 15, 2021, after Ghani had given up all hope of bringing both peace and democracy to the country he had then led. With the Taliban now in total command, the US and its allies decided to punish the new government by stopping the flow of assistance to the country and impounding the official deposits held by Kabul in the Federal Reserve Bank in the US. The commercial banking system followed, and the Afghans were now without financial resources to buy food and healthcare for the increasingly desperate population. The UN has estimated that more than half of the population faced early death because of food shortages and the absence of health facilities. Children were likely to suffer the most.

As a part of the sudden pullout of troops from Afghanistan, President Biden pledged that he would keep a close watch on Afghanistan. He promised to mount what he described as 'over the horizon' counterterrorism operations to check Afghanistan from becoming a source of international terrorism once again. That Washington had the ability to do that was demonstrated on August 2, 2022, when it launched an attack on an apartment in which Ayman al-Zawahiri had lived for a while. The building he and his family occupied was located in the center of Kabul. Other members of his family were not hurt although they were located in the house Zawahiri had occupied. This was the first known...