Afghanistan is Not Becoming Better

For John, BLUF:  This is a very insightful article, a warning that it isn't over just because we are pulling out of Afghanistan.  Their goal is to expand Islam by the sword.  Spain is not safe.  None of us are safe.  Even China should be concerned.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Afghanistan, Again, Becomes a Cradle for Jihadism—and Al Qaeda

Here is the sub-headline:

The terrorist group has outlasted the trillion-dollar U.S. investment in Afghanistan since 9/11.

From The New Yorker, by Robin Wright,♠ 23 August 2021.

Here is the lede plus one:

In March, I travelled to Afghanistan and the Middle East with General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., the Alabama-born marine who heads Central Command.  He has been overseeing the frantic evacuation out of Kabul.  During one of several interviews aboard his plane, I asked him, “Do you really think, given the intermarriage, the interweaving of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, that the Taliban is really ever going to be able or willing to restrain Al Qaeda from doing anything against us?”  By then, the Taliban held roughly half of Afghanistan, a country about the size of Texas. McKenzie was chillingly candid.  “I think it will be very hard for the Taliban to act against Al Qaeda, to actually limit their ability to attack outside the country,” he replied.  “It’s possible, but I think it would be difficult.”

For more than a year, both the Trump and Biden Administrations had reams of warnings—from the military and diplomats, congressional reports and a commissioned study group, its own inspector general, and the United Nations—that the collapse of the Afghan government, an ever-growing possibility, would also mean a resurgence of Al Qaeda.  In April, a U.S. intelligence assessment warned Congress that Al Qaeda’s senior leadership “will continue to plot attacks and seek to exploit conflicts in different regions.”  The jihadist group, which carried out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was active in fifteen of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces, primarily in the eastern and southern regions, the United Nations reported in June.  The Taliban and Al Qaeda remained “closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties,” it noted, as like-minded militants celebrated developments in Afghanistan as a victory for “global radicalism.” In a haunting final report on the lessons learned from America’s longest war, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, warned that the U.S. decision to pull out the last U.S. troops “left uncertain whether even the modest gains of the last two decades will prove sustainable.”  The decision to pull out was made by President Trump in February last year, with the timetable decided by President Biden in April this year.

She goes on:

As the core of the movement came under U.S. military pressure, he [Al Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri] and bin Laden advocated for the creation of Al Qaeda branches across the Islamic world as part of its survival strategy, according to Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent for counterterrorism and the author of “The Black Banners:  The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.”  Zawahiri’s more patient strategy has worked, while the more aggressive strategy of the rival Islamic State has flamed out, Soufan told me.  ISIS had many times more members, but Al Qaeda fighters were far more experienced, more strategic, and hardened in battle.  Al Qaeda’s strategy—dubbed the “management of savagery”—has three phases.  The first includes terrorist attacks to weaken the international and regional order.  The second, as government authority erodes or collapses, is to prevent other political forces from filling the vacuum, so as to allow Al Qaeda’s movements to “take pride of position,” Soufan said.  The final stage is to establish a state and stitch the other regions together into a caliphate.

And further:

The common flaw in U.S. policy has been the focus on the fight rather than the economic, political, and social flash points that gave rise to multiple jihadist movements among both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, dating back at least four decades, Soufan said.  “We’ve been spiking the ball at the five-yard line,” like a football player claiming points before actually scoring a touchdown, he told me. “Yes, we defeated the physical manifestation of the caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we never dealt with the ideology.”  The extremist brands of politicized Islam have usually emerged in countries plagued by poverty and high unemployment, autocratic rule and political alienation, sectarian or social marginalization, and heavy foreign influence.  “All the elements that gave rise to these movements, they’re all worse than they were immediately prior to 9/11,” Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former British diplomat who is now the coördinator of the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team that tracks extremist movements, told me.  “I can’t think of a serious underlying factor in the rise of isis or Al Qaeda that has been mitigated, and some are worse.”

Al Qaeda’s resurgence may not have immediate consequences for the U.S. homeland, the experts said.  “Al Qaeda probably does not pose, right now, a direct threat to the West,” Fitton-Brown said.  “But it intends to do so and has a route to do so, which may bear fruit in one or more of these locations,” whether Syria, Yemen, Somalia, the Sahel and West Africa, or elsewhere.  “It would be premature and risky to regard Al Qaeda and isis as defeated, and to relax that counterterrorism pressure.”  Al Qaeda’s broader focus, Soufan said, will be on destabilizing Muslim countries where, as in Afghanistan, governments are frail, have fled, or do not exist.  The goal now is to replicate the victory in Afghanistan elsewhere—phase two.  “Their plan,” he said, “is much more dangerous than a terrorist attack.”

It won't be over when we finally pull out of Afghanistan.  Our opponents have longer term goals and the are bigger than Afghanistan.  They are bigger than Iraq and Syria.  The leaders of the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS see themselves restoring the reach if Islam, reaching into Spain and the gates of Vienna and into India (and, I suspect, into China).

We can ignore where we are going, but it will be costly.

Regards  —  Cliff

< ♠  Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah:  Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”