October 1, 2018 | The Weekly Standard
Badness Personified
Jalaluddin Haqqani is dead. The terror network he created lives on.
An excerpt from the op-ed follows:
On September 4, the Taliban announced that Jalaluddin Haqqani had “passed away after a long battle with illness.” A notorious jihadist who was one of Osama bin Laden’s earliest and closest allies, Haqqani had long been a recluse, with rumors swirling that he left the land of the living some years ago. But if the Taliban is telling the truth, then Haqqani died only recently. The terrorist organization he built lives on, however, and it has more influence today than ever. And a brief look at Haqqani’s career helps to explain how al Qaeda survived America’s relentless post-9/11 counterterrorism campaign.
After the September 11 attacks, some claimed that the hijackings were blowback—a consequence of America’s decision to work with Osama bin Laden and his men during the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This “blame America” argument is still popular in the fever swamps online. But there is no publicly available evidence suggesting the CIA was ever in direct cahoots with bin Laden. Haqqani is a different story, however, and a problematic one at that. The CIA, along with its Pakistani and Saudi allies, did back Haqqani and his followers against the Russians.
Read the full article here.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow him on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn.
Follow the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.