[Not likely, at least in the short
term, intelligence officials assess. But stopping terrorism groups over the
long term could be more difficult.]
By Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt
The answer is no, at least not right
away. But over the longer term, the question is far more difficult to answer.
The United States could find itself pulled back into Afghanistan much as it was
in Iraq, some current and former officials warned.
Intelligence officials have offered
the Biden administration an overall
grim portrait of the future of Afghanistan itself, predicting that the
Taliban will make battlefield gains, Afghan government forces will struggle to
hold territory and a peace deal between them is unlikely. The broad outlines of
that assessment were made public in an intelligence
report released on Tuesday.
Still, on the critical question of
whether direct threats to the United States still exist in Afghanistan, U.S.
spy agencies have privately offered a rosier picture.
The agencies do not believe Al
Qaeda or other terrorist groups pose an immediate threat to strike the United
States from Afghanistan, an assessment that the Biden administration considered
pivotal as it weighed continuing the war or pulling out forces this year.
Al Qaeda planned the Sept. 11
attacks from Afghanistan, and in the weeks after the attacks, the United States
invaded to oust the terrorist group from its haven and topple the Taliban,
which had harbored Al Qaeda, from power. The invasion of Afghanistan ushered in
a decades-long era of warfare, with the military fighting grinding
counterinsurgency battles in the name of preventing new terrorist attacks on
America.
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State’s
Afghanistan branch remain very weak inside the country, according to three
senior officials briefed on the intelligence. Islamic State fighters in
Afghanistan are focused on making local gains, not mounting international
attacks. And the Taliban remains hostile to the group.
Al Qaeda’s relationship with the
Taliban is far more complicated. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the
Taliban-controlled Afghan government offered safe haven to Al Qaeda. As part of
the 2020 peace agreement with the United States, the Taliban agreed to sever
ties with terrorist groups including Al Qaeda and prevent them from operating
inside Afghanistan. Whether the Taliban intends to honor that agreement is
unknown.
No one can predict whether Al Qaeda
will bounce back or how quickly. But some officials believe that the United
States is unlikely to be caught unaware of a renewed Qaeda threat, pointing to
U.S. counterterrorism capabilities and intelligence collection built up over
the past two decades.
“The terrorism threat from the
Afghan region is not zero, but, at the moment, it’s less than it is in other
parts of the world,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and
the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on
Tuesday. “So the question is, can we continue to suppress the terrorism threat”
from southwest Asia “without our troops being on the ground in Afghanistan?”
If the United States withdraws from
Afghanistan, it is not clear whether Al Qaeda could rebuild a base there for
carrying out terrorist attacks against the United States, according to senior
lawmakers with access to the classified assessments. And even if Al Qaeda could
rebound, some officials have asked if the group might choose another lawless
region over Afghanistan.
“What is that threat really going
to be?” Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington and the chairman of
the House Armed Services Committee, said last month during a virtual conference
on Afghanistan. “This isn’t the 1990s when Al Qaeda set up camps, and they had
the Taliban and no one was paying attention to them.”
But collecting intelligence will
become far more difficult once U.S. troops leave, current and former officials
acknowledged. While some counterterrorism operations against terrorists inside
Afghanistan can be conducted from far-flung bases in the Persian Gulf and
elsewhere outside the country, they are risky and difficult to pull off. Mr.
Biden or future presidents may be reluctant to approve them.
And with a weakened Afghan
government facing pressure from the Taliban, conditions would be ripe for Qaeda
cells to grow, some counterterrorism officials said.
“Ungoverned spaces, let alone a
known terrorist organization like the Taliban dominating a nation, is
altogether an ideal breeding ground for disparate terrorist groups that
threaten the United States to find save haven and shelter,” said Marc
Polymeropoulos, a former C.I.A. officer who spent much of his career working on
counterterrorism operations, including in Afghanistan.
Though the threat from
international terrorist groups operating from Afghanistan is low, it might not
stay that way, said Michael P. Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and C.I.A.
officer who served in Afghanistan. U.S. counterterrorism operations have put
continuous pressure on terrorist groups throughout the Afghanistan war. Once
the troops leave, he said, that pressure will decline and the ability to
collect intelligence in the region will suffer.
“While it is understandable to want
all our forces to come home, it should not be at the expense of losing what we
have gained to do so,” he said. “Repositioning our counterterrorism
capabilities outside of the country will significantly reduce our intelligence
collection operations and our ability to conduct unilateral operations against
direct threats to the homeland.”
Other current and former
intelligence officials noted that collection abilities have significantly
improved since the Sept. 11 attacks.
American commanders, who have
supported a peace deal with the Taliban as the best security measure for the
United States, have long argued that the success of any agreement would hinge
on tying the withdrawal of U.S. troops to security conditions on the ground.
“Since 9/11, our strategic
objective in Afghanistan remains to safeguard the homeland from attacks,” Gen.
Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of the military’s Central Command, said in February, singling out Al Qaeda and the Islamic
State, “and preventing them from using Afghanistan as a base and safe haven.”
“We all agree that the best path is
going to be a negotiated political settlement among the Afghans. No one debates
that essential point,” General McKenzie added. “However, you have to take a
conditions-based approach.”
But that is exactly the open-ended
path that Mr.
Biden has now ruled out, aides said.
For the Pentagon and the
intelligence community, a key debate is now how easily counterterrorism
operations can be started from outside Afghanistan. The history of such
operations, beginning with the failed 1980 Delta Force operation to free
American hostages in Iran, has a decidedly mixed record. Cruise missile strikes
launched from distant ships against terrorist targets in Afghanistan also have
a low rate of success.
The farther that Special Operations
forces have to travel to strike a target, the more likely the operations are to
fail, either by missing their mark or resulting in a catastrophic failure that
kills American service members, according to officials who have studied the
record.
Other officials said the United
States had steadily improved at such operations. And when given enough
resources, such so-called over-the-horizon attacks could be a viable option to
stop the development of any terrorist cells in Afghanistan.
Not long ago, terrorism threats
dominated the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment released by the intelligence
community, but such attention has diminished. In the edition of the report
released on Tuesday, the global terrorism section was little more than a page
near the end of the 27-page document.
The decline of the terrorism threat
reflects the success of the military and intelligence community over the last
two decades, argued Mr. Schiff, who supports Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw
forces from Afghanistan. The government was properly shifting resources and
attention to the threats
from China, Russia and domestic terrorism, he said.
“We’ve been pretty successful since
9/11 in suppressing the terrorism threat,” Mr. Schiff said. But, he added, “we
haven’t removed it. And at any moment you can have another attack that suddenly
makes it a very different calculus.”