The bodies are piling up in Afghanistan as the Taliban claim to be wiping the country clean of a resurgent Islamic State in a campaign that should be music to the ears of the U.S. military, counterterrorism, and intelligence communities, which regard the Islamic State as a major threat to homeland and global security. But many security experts believe the Talibans rampage is just cover for eradicating enemies, including U.S.-trained former military members, while al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups grow stronger in the absence of any meaningful counterterrorism response from the United States.
The United States slunk out of Afghanistan in late August 2021, after 20 years spent fighting the Taliban, which had harbored the al Qaeda terrorists who blew up the twin towers in New York, took a chunk out of the Pentagon, and knocked U.S. foreign policy askew for a generation. When former U.S. President Donald Trump handed Afghanistan to the Taliban in the 2020 Doha, Qatar, peace deal, an explicit condition was that the resurgent Taliban would sever their ties with al Qaeda. An implicit understanding was that Washington would be able to maintain an over-the-horizon counterterrorism capability in the country. The Biden administration, which carried out the final, ignominious withdrawal from Kabul in 2021, has claimed that despite having no boots on the ground, it would still have plenty of eyes in the sky, as it were.
And there have been a few successes. A U.S. drone scissored through Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al Qaedas frontman, as he stood on the balcony of a Kabul villa last year. The head of U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, has hinted at other, similar operations, but no details have been made public.
But U.S. and Afghan security and diplomatic sources say the United States relies on intelligence provided by the Talibanmost of whose leadership is sanctioned by the United Nations for terrorismabout terrorist activities in Afghanistan. Poachers can be turned into gamekeepers; inmates, though, make poor wardens. Taliban information is likely self-serving, if not false, those sources said.
Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, said last year that even in the wake of the hit on Zawahiri, we are prepared to engage pragmatically with the Taliban regarding terrorism concerns, and he referred to the local branch of the Islamic State, known as IS-Khorasan Province, or IS-K, as a common enemy. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he said the United States is extremely concerned about terrorist groups that still have an active presence in Afghanistan.
A new report on global terrorism concluded that, for the fourth consecutive year, Afghanistan is the country most impactedand thats even though Taliban atrocities are no longer included in the count, since the former terrorists are now the nominal government. Next door in Pakistan, where the Taliban spinoff is reemerging, deaths caused by terrorism more than doubled from the previous year, rising to 643, said the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace.
The Taliban count anti-terrorism scalps by pretending to fight IS-K. Whats odd is that a lot of the terrorism attacks in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover look a whole lot like those that used to be chalked up to the Haqqani network, an offshoot of the Taliban thats close to al Qaeda and headed by the current de facto interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani. Those include the suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport in August 2021, that killed 13 U.S. military personnel and many Afghans during the chaotic evacuation.
That attack, and other mass-casualty events, such as the attack in September on a Hazara education center, have been claimed by IS-K. To keep its theoretical monopoly on violence, the Taliban leadership has had to make a show of eradicating its local Islamic State franchise. It has also made U.S. military and intelligence officials worry about just what threat IS-K might pose to the homeland.
Kurilla, the head of Centcom, name-checked IS-K when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 16. He reckoned that the group could attain the capacity to attack targets in Europe and Asia within six months, but he conceded that it would have greater difficulty attacking the United States. The U.S. intelligence communitys 2023 Annual Threat Assessment said IS-K almost certainly retains the intent to conduct operations in the West and will continue efforts to attack outside Afghanistan.
The first problem, some former Afghan hands say, is that Washington has swallowed the Islamic State lure hook, line, and sinker. Annie Pforzheimer, a former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, called it an alarming miscalculation by West, the U.S. special representative, that the United States and Afghanistan shared a common enemy in IS-K. There should be no illusions that the Taliban is doing anything to weed out the presence of terrorist groups on Afghan soil, which is why they are under U.N. sanction, she wrote recently.
The second problem is that al Qaeda is still a thing, and the Taliban still work with the group, despite Trumps failed peace plan.
The Taliban have been enmeshed with al Qaeda for decades. They harbored Osama bin Laden as he planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, prompting the U.S.-led invasion that ended their first regime and started the vicious 20-year war. After victory in August 2021, the Taliban again welcomed their old friends with state sponsorship necessary for achieving their long-term ambition of toppling modern governments and establishing a caliphate. Zawahiris presence in the Afghan capital was evidence of the comfortable ties between the two groups, but also of U.S. intelligence capabilities in Afghanistan at the time. That might have been more a blip than a feature.
By concentrating on the short-term aims and capabilities of IS-K, some analysts believe, the United States and its allies are missing the long-term threat posed by al Qaeda.
To me, al Qaeda is the greater threat than the Islamic State. Its because of its patience. The Islamic State is more of an immediate threat. It likes to conduct attacks for its propaganda and recruiting. But I dont think it has a real caliphate-building plan. And al Qaeda does. Al Qaeda is patient. Patient and thoughtful enemies are what scares me, terrorism analyst Bill Roggio said last year.
Its hard to say exactly what the counterterrorism relationship between Washington and Kabul is these days. CIA officials and Taliban agents, whove met at least twice in the Qatari capital, Doha, in the past six months, probably discuss counterterrorism issues, said another former Afghan security official, though release of Americans in Taliban prisons obviously tops the agenda. A different Afghan official suggested its a one-way street. The United States will jump on any information that is related to national security, but sharing intelligence with the Taliban? Thats a big no. Another, who held a sub-cabinet post in the pre-Taliban government, doubted any sort of covenant.
There is no formal covert or overt arrangement on counterterrorism between the Taliban and the U.S., they said.
The burr in the saddle that bites deep is Zawahiri. Forged in the Egyptian jihad, he took over the helm of al Qaeda after Navy Seals dispatched bin Laden one night in the spring of 2011. Still, though, he shouldnt have been in Kabul, of all places.
The Zawahiri strike looms large in the minds of counterterrorism strategists, even those who felt some kind of cooperation was absolutely essential; they feel burned by the Taliban bringing Zawahiri to Kabul, said Asfandyar Mir, an expert on South Asia security issues at the United States Institute of Peace. A lot of people feel that we had a pact with the Talibanwe made it clear that there is one thing you cannot do, and thats to bring the leadership of al Qaeda, or any of the groups that we are concerned about, to Afghanistan. Now that trust deficit runs deep.
The trust deficit has a blood price. The Taliban are using the cover of counterterrorism to mask systematic killings of former security service personnel. Former soldiers, commandos, and police are regularly killedshot, beheaded, dismembered, or set on fire, and their families killed with themand their deaths reported by human rights organizations and the armed opposition National Resistance Front (NRF).
The Taliban are, in fact, battling with IS-K. But not on the battlefield. They are fighting on the recruiting ground. The Islamic State is making inroads among disaffected Taliban foot soldiers, who are footsore and underpaid. That doesnt mean that the Taliban are suddenly MI6.
The Talibans rank and file will never fight against ISIS, said NRF spokesman Ali Maisam Nazary. He said the Taliban and IS-K are two sides of the same coin.
The Talibans leadership know that any attempt to go against any jihadist organization will cause their own disintegration and demise. The international community needs allies who arent recognized terrorists to help with counterterrorism, Nazary said.
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What Happened to the Taliban's Pledge to Fight Terrorism? - Foreign Policy