After 20 years of drone strikes, it's time to admit they've failed

But what the gossip and the op-eds didn't mention was that the real surprise wasn't Haqqani's public appearances--it was that he was appearing at all: Multiple times over the last two decades, the US military thought they'd killed him in drone strikes. Clearly Haqqani is alive and well. But that raises a glaring question: if Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani wasn't killed in those US drone strikes, who was? The usual bland response is "terrorists," an answer now institutionalized by the highest levels of the US security state. But the final days of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan showed that is not necessarily true.