Justice for Zawahiri — But What Does It Mean, Zen Master?

BUCK: The news that struck a lot of us — one of those things that you hear about and I think you’ll remember where you were when you heard it, especially for those of you who served in the military; were part of what we used to call back in my day in the CIA and certainly U.S. military used to call it the GWAT, the Global War Against Terror, and then that changed. Remember the Obama administration came out initially… They wanted to change the GWAT and make it something like “overseas contingency operations to deal with violent extremism in a limited context” or something like that.

It was absurd. The acronym was so long that nobody was gonna remember it, so they bailed out of that. But Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s number two. That is the big news of the last 24 hours — in addition to the Pelosi touchdown in Taiwan, which I think is likely to be something that people in foreign policy circles talk about a lot; I’m not sure it’s really going to have very much actual impact or change at all, but we’ll see. In fact, we also will see what the impact is in Afghanistan now after Zawahiri was killed. Just by way of quick context here, Zawahiri was bin Laden’s number two and a direct plotter of 9/11, celebrated 9/11 afterwards.

He was also involved in the bombing of the USS Cole and was a terror mastermind. He, after bin Laden, is the individual with the single biggest influence on Al-Qaeda over the years. And we used a Switchblade drone, which managed to take him out of the balcony of a house within walking distance of the U.S. embassy compound in Afghanistan, or now the former U.S. embassy compound in Afghanistan. But it was in a well-to-do neighborhood, a little bit reminiscent in that sense of the bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. It’s actually named for a British man; I believe it was General Abbott.

That goes back to the British-Afghan wars, of which there were a couple. But he was clearly known to be, by the Taliban, in Kabul. He was in a house that even some had reported has connections, direct connections to the Haqqani network. So let me tell you what I think about all this. On the one hand there’s the sense of justice done. It took over 20 years, and that’s with multiple invasions in the region. That’s with ongoing counterterrorism operations. I was an analyst and part of targeting operations for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center for a number of years.

I was in CIA a decade ago now, and obviously Zawahiri has been a top target of the U.S. national security complex. He had a $25 million bounty on his head. And we want justice to this day for 9/11, the same way that anybody who had anything to with the Holocaust, years and years later, they were hunted down and made to stand trial or taken out. We have that feeling about anybody involved in 9/11. We will hunt them down; we will take them out. So that’s the right thing and in that sense is a moment to mark and say, “Justice done.” I don’t really get into the cheering and celebrating over these things.

This is solemn. This is something we must do as a country. We have to be steely eyed about it, and it is the right move. But, you know, this is not the U.S., you know, national team in some sport winning. I mean, this is a moment of remembrance, and there’s a solemnity to what Al-Qaeda did to us. The fact that we needed to achieve this justice in the first place, I think, certainly for the 9/11 families out there. We need to remember the price that was paid. We need to remember the price that was paid by our service members who went overseas, first to Afghanistan, then to Iraq, spent decades in Afghanistan trying to prevent, essentially, what has now happened, which is that…

And this is the other part of it. What is the state of terror support in Kabul and Afghanistan right now? The Taliban runs that country. They are the government within just like they were in the 1990s. You’ll remember, I’m sure, the movie Charlie Wilson’s War. I also read the book a long time ago. It is a very readable, very enjoyable book, and the movie is well done too with Tom Hanks. You’ll remember at the end of it, the character who was played by… He’s the CIA officer played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and he talks about what he says — and this is an Aaron Sorkin movie.

I don’t know if this even a real Zen master tale or if this is something someone found on the internet somewhere. But he tells the story of a Zen master who observed the people of his village celebrating because a young boy is give a horse, and it’s a wonderful gift, and he says, “We’ll see.” That’s what the Zen master says. And the boy falls off the horse, he breaks a leg, and everyone says, “The horse is a curse,” and the Zen master says, “We’ll see.”

And then war breaks out, and the boy can’t actually be pulled into the ranks of the military because of the injury of got from riding the horse, and then everyone says, “Wow, what great luck he had,” and the Zen master says, “We’ll see.” You get where this is going. Remember that part of Charlie Wilson’s War? It was in one of those moments where there was a lesson to be learned. You also heard, if memory serves in the movie, a plane very markedly on approach to… I don’t think it would be Dulles. It would have been Reagan airport, probably, given where they were in the movie.

And it was an indicator of, “Okay. The Soviet Union has fallen, the mujahideen are victorious. What comes next?” and we know what comes next. That leads us, then, years later to 9/11, to bin Laden, to Zawahiri — or as some people you’ll hear on TV saying it, Zawahiri, but I like the Americanized version. And here now we have to say, how is it possible that we can think Afghanistan is going to be anything other than an ally to terrorists and terror-sponsoring regimes in the future when it is run by the Haqqani network. Again, those of you who served specifically in the Afghan and the AfPak know they’re as bad as it gets.

They have U.S. blood on their hands. They are wanted terrorists. They run the Afghan government right now. That’s who’s in charge in Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahiri moved in 2022 to Kabul. That’s how safe he felt. He didn’t just go to Afghanistan. He’s not in some outlying village up in the Hindu Kush or something, he went right into the capital city, right into downtown and was hanging out on the balcony. Now, yes, it is a good tactical operation and a success in that respect that he was taken out by these Switchblade drones — or Switchblade missile, rather — fired from a Reaper drone. And it is right to mark this and it is a good thing. Here is Biden, by the way. I meant to play this a moment ago, but I got wrapped up in the analysis. Here he is announcing the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri. Play it.

BUCK: They had him under surveillance, reportedly. They knew where he was for months. I do not believe that the timing of this is a coincidence ’cause I know some of you are gonna be calling in or writing in and saying, “Oh, come on. This…” Yes, of course. Holding this one in the back pocket just in time for the midterms? Yes. I think that was a factor, to say the least, in the timing of this. Does anyone really think, given the realities of what the Obama administration was doing with drones and the drone strikes and the civilian casualties that they were racking up at the time — which you didn’t hear much about because the media was all in the tank for Obama, as you know.

But if they had told us, “We killed Zawahiri, we blew up a car, four people inside dead,” would anybody have said for a moment, “Oh, they couldn’t have done that! This is Al-Qaeda’s guy right now.” Since the death of bin Laden he has been the most senior, the most powerful, most influential member of Al-Qaeda, certainly as it pertains to reputation and the influence of Al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization. So I think they likely waited on this. Can never prove that, right? She says “we waited for the optimal moment.” Sure. It is amazing technology they used. You can read about it now.

It’s much more out there than drone strikes used to be, basically deploying giant razor blades. It’s a relatively new thing. Limits civilian casualties. You don’t have the same kind of shrapnel effect, and so people in the area much less likely to be killed as collateral damage. But let’s remember, when the Biden administration was looking completely inept and idiotic, what did they do? They ordered a drone strike on a car full of people and killed a whole family, folks! That remember during the Afghanistan withdrawal? Oh, so when Biden looks bad on TV, they’ll order a drone strike that kills a family of — I think it was — six or seven, including small children.

And I know they say, “Oh, but it was just a mistake.” Yeah, but they didn’t wait very long to verify it, did they? Very different set of considerations for that drone strike than for this drone strike where they were sitting on it and waiting to imply it for maximum effect. So back to the Zen master. What does this mean now? I see that all these Democrats say, “Ha! We’ve finally shown Al-Qaeda.” Really? Al-Qaeda now has a Taliban that is hosting it, again, in Afghanistan. What happened after bin Laden was killed in 2011? Just do a quick run-through in your mind. Did all the terrorists run for cover? Were all the terrorists terrified around the world?

No, of course not.

You had the rise of ISIS.

You had Abu Bakr al-Bagdhadi leading brigade-level forces to take Mosul — to completely overrun Iraqi forces we had been training for years — to set up a caliphate to have mass slavery, to have murders once again recorded, people taking with hands bound of the desert. That was all happening under the Obama administration after bin Laden was killed. So there’s the politics of this and there’s the reality of it. Yes, it was the right thing to kill Zawahiri. It is a very concerning development that he’s in downtown Kabul, and what does this mean for our War on Terror going forward? Those of you who have fought it — those of you who have been over there and seen and know — you know what I’m gonna say.

“We’ll see.”