he balcony in Kabul where the head of al-Qaida was killed was a spot Dan Smock knew well. It used to be his – when he worked inSmock enjoyed starting the day looking out at the Afghan capital, as did the world’s most wanted terrorist, from the villa they both called home, several years apart.
The cream house, with sandy-orange detailing and green-mirrored balcony walls was in a neighbourhood famous for land grabs by the warlords and technocrat elite of the Afghan republic, which collapsed last summer. Then, on Monday evening, the US president, Joe Biden, told Americans that the al-Qaida leader, Zawahiri,And Smock, a US military veteran of the war in Iraq, who also spent years working as a civilian in Afghanistan, realised he had lived in the same space as one of the men who plotted the 9/11 attacks.
“Down by the [Ghazanfar] bank and Spinneys [supermarket], there are two entrances on either side. If you control those you control the whole neighbourhood,” said Smock. Biden hailed the drone strike as a counter-terrorism triumph, but to Smock the fact that Zawahiri had been there at all underlined how terribly Washington and its allies had failed in Afghanistan.