America's 20-year engagement with Afghanistan

...and the unrealised pomegranate peace

The other day a US contractor, Dan Smock was on the radio from Texas. He was telling the BBC about his shock in recognising the house in which Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri was killed. (Have a listen if you can on this link. Mr Smock’s account starts at roughly 28 minutes.)

That house, targeted by a CIA drone strike, had once been Mr Smock’s home. He had lived there for a while, as he worked in the US embassy not too far away. He had been on the balcony that Zawahiri is said to have enjoyed every day. It was the balcony that proved Zawahiri’s undoing, the point to which the Hellfire missiles were directed. Mr Smock knew the top apartment in which the Egyptian surgeon-turned-militant lived. It was all quite comfortable, Mr Smock attested.

As I listened to him I realised it’s entirely possible that I too had passed by that house at some point. In the year I lived on the US embassy Kabul compound, I visited the British embassy nearby. The house in which Zawahiri was holed up is said to…