SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — The last Afghan head of intelligence before the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan believes terrorist groups have regained a foothold in the country, and that conditions there are ripe for what he called a jihadist “utopia.”
In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Ahmad Zia Saraj said the world needed “a wakeup call,” given that more than a dozen regional Islamist terrorist groups have reconstituted operations in Afghanistan since the 2021 U.S. withdrawal and return of Taliban rule. Saraj said the groups had taken advantage of implicit support from the Taliban, the freeing of thousands of prisoners, and a rise in the influence of Islamic seminaries, or madrassahs.
“I believe that this is really a utopia for jihadi groups - and they are assisted by tens of thousands of students who have graduated from Islamic madrassahs in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Saraj said. “They have free or very cheap manpower…so this makes Afghanistan a place where they can accomplish a lot.”
Saraj said the war in Gaza had become a recruiting tool for the groups, with Israeli attacks against Palestinians featured in videos that circulate among jihadists in Afghanistan and other countries. The Taliban’s ouster of the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul, he said, has been paired with Hamas’ deadly October 7 raid on southern Israel as narratives of jihadi success.
“The first thing that these so-called ‘victories’ give to the Taliban and to the rest of the terrorist groups wherever they are, it's inspiration,” he said.
Saraj, who fled Kabul in August 2021 and is now a visiting professor at King’s College London, said the threat may currently be limited to governments in the region; Uzbek and Tajik groups in Afghanistan, for example, which seek to bring Islamic rule to their countries. But he warned that conditions in Afghanistan today mirror those that existed prior to September 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda operatives used safe havens to plan their attacks on the U.S.
In a paper written earlier this year, under the heading “2024 Afghan Threat Assessment,” Saraj wrote that “the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2021 opened a new chapter of terrorism in Afghanistan and the region.”
“Today it’s not a big issue for the U.S.,” he said in the interview, “but at some point it will be a threat, if we do not pay proper attention.”
The Global View
Many of Saraj’s concerns are shared by a United Nations group that monitors conditions in Afghanistan. According to the latest report from the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, Al Qaeda has opened eight new training camps in the country since the U.S. withdrawal, along with five madrassahs, a weapons depot and several safe houses. The report said that “the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda remains close,” and that Al Qaeda runs training camps for the groups and has established a base “to stockpile weaponry” in the province of Panjshir.
Writing for The Cipher Brief last week, Dave Pitts, a former CIA director for South and Central Asia who was among the last Americans to leave Kabul in 2021, said that “it seems clear that the country continues to provide safe haven and raw materials that allow terrorist attacks, terrorist recruitment, and extremist ideology to spread from Afghanistan across the region and beyond.”
The 2024 U.S. Threat Assessment Report, issued in March, mentioned Afghanistan only briefly and was more sanguine about the threat. The report said that “While Al Qaeda has reached an operational nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ISIS has suffered cascading leadership losses in Iraq and Syria, regional affiliates will continue to expand.”
On one point, U.S. intelligence officials have echoed Saraj’s warnings. In March, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” given the war's ability to inspire would-be terrorists.
John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA and a Cipher Brief expert, said that "while the U.S. is markedly better than before 9/11 at detecting threats to the homeland, the thing that terrorists need the most to circumvent our defenses is safe haven to plan and prepare operations - and they have that in Afghanistan." As for the impact of the war in Gaza, McLaughlin told The Cipher Brief, "We are, with all the complexities of the conflict in Gaza, creating a new generation of terrorists or at least a generation of people ripe for recruitment by terrorists.”
14 jihadist groups
The one Afghanistan-based group that has drawn widespread attention is the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, which has carried out repeated attacks beyond Afghanistan’s borders, most recently the March 22 attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow that killed more than 140 people. ISIS-K also stands out because it has clashed with the Taliban; the U.S. Threat Assessment Report said that ISIS-K “is trying to conduct attacks that undermine the legitimacy of the Taliban regime.”
But Saraj has identified a dozen other jihadist groups that are flourishing in Afghanistan, in no small part because the Taliban has welcomed them. Many of these organizations are made up of foreign nationals who fought alongside the Taliban during the long U.S. war, and Saraj says Taliban leaders feel indebted to them and are “happy to give them the shelter and to allow them to operate.”
In February 2021, when Saraj ran the National Directorate of Security (NDS), he convened a meeting in Kabul of his counterparts from seven other countries in the region. The aim was to warn the intelligence chiefs of the dangers that might follow a U.S. withdrawal – in particular the potential threat posed by nationals from their countries who were involved in jihadist groups.
They “needed to understand that if Afghanistan was overwhelmed by (the jihadists), these terror groups would not stop, and would expand in the region,” he said.
Today Saraj says the messages were largely ignored, and that 14 jihadist groups “with regional or global ambitions” now operate with impunity in Afghanistan. Many have roots in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan – three of the countries that were represented at the NDS conference.
Saraj believes that beyond the groups' regional goals, such as bringing Sharia law or other forms of Taliban-like rule to their countries, they are also inspired by the long-standing Al Qaeda call for a new Islamic caliphate.
“Millions of people who are studying in madrassahs, they are always getting the education to kill non-Muslims and to raise the flag of Islam across the globe,” Saraj said. “So we cannot say it will stay in just one or two countries.”
He also cited “evidence and intelligence that shows that they are passing their messages to their friends across the globe, like in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere, to say that now, the safest place in the world for these groups is in Afghanistan.”
A recruitment bonanza
When the Taliban took over, the new regime released thousands of foreign fighters from prisons and detention centers, along with more than 8,000 prisoners who had been jailed for kidnapping, theft and other serious crimes. Many outside analysts have said these ex-prisoners are prime recruits for the various jihadist organizations.
Saraj cited the story of “Engineer Sharif,” a bomb-maker who worked a decade ago with a group that carried out several large-scale attacks, including a truck bomb at the German Embassy in Kabul in May 2017 which killed more than 150 people and left at least 400 others wounded. Engineer Sharif and all his team members were released as part of the Taliban amnesty in 2021.
“A lot of these trained bomb-makers invested so many years of their time and energy to learn this skill and practice it against their own people in Afghanistan,” Saraj wrote in his Afghan Threat Assessment. “It is almost impossible for them to return to a normal life. Most either must find a new place to use their expertise in the region, or return to civilian life which does not have the same attraction or supposed rewards.”
If former prisoners have offered one source of recruits for the jihadists, the proliferation of madrassahs has brought another, with more young people studying in schools that often embrace jihadist messages. The U.N. estimates that 3 million students now attend these seminaries.
Under the Taliban, Saraj said, “While modern-educated professional teachers are dismissed in large numbers, under various pretexts, unqualified and hate-filled madrassah instructors replace them.” He warned that “the graduates will either become die-hard fighters for the Taliban, or other terrorist groups, or become a suicide bomber.”
An American promise
On August 16, 2021, as Taliban forces moved into Kabul and the U.S. rushed to evacuate American troops and Afghan citizens who had helped them, President Joe Biden said the withdrawal wouldn’t hamper U.S. efforts to fight terrorism in the region.
“We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence,” Biden said. “If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.”
“Over-the-horizon” – as in, watching and policing from afar – remains the American approach, and U.S. officials say they have already seen a clear case of its success in Afghanistan. On July 31, 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s longtime deputy and ultimate successor as Al Qaeda chief. The Defense Department said after the strike that “Zawahiri was killed in an over-the-horizon operation in downtown Kabul,” and a senior official said "his death deals a significant blow to al-Qaeda and will degrade the group's ability to operate."
Saraj and other observers drew a different lesson. They noted that Zawahiri had been living in the heart of Kabul, in a safe house run by a lieutenant of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban regime’s Interior Minister. Haqqani and many of his top lieutenants are on a U.S. list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, but they were living in the open and helping to harbor a man who had orchestrated the 9-11 attacks. Saraj called the episode “emblematic of how terrorist groups in Afghanistan are hosted and sheltered by the Taliban.”
How to respond
What to do about the current threat? Saraj believes the international community has two options – either recognize the gravity of the problem and find a solution, “for the safety and prosperity of the region and the world,” or “wait or ignore this threat until it engulfs other countries which will be devastating for the region and later the world.”
But “solutions” to this problem remain elusive. While Saraj says the answer must rest in part with the Afghan people - “Unity behind a clear set of national values is no doubt the medicine for this cancer,” he wrote in his paper - any “values” that depart from the Taliban approach are probably non-starters.
No one is arguing for a U.S. return to Afghanistan – “I know that that era is gone,” Saraj said – but he thinks the U.S. and other countries need to be paying more attention to the growth and spread of the jihadist groups. For the moment, he said, even countries in the region are playing down the threat; intelligence officials in neighboring Uzbekistan, for example, appear unconcerned, provided the Uzbeks remain in Afghanistan.
Saraj called that “a very naive kind of thinking,” and he worries that U.S. officials – understandably distracted by wars and tensions from Ukraine to Gaza and China – might also be paying insufficient attention to the risks.
“In some of the briefings I have had with my American colleagues," Saraj said, "I thought that there was a naivete on their part as well, that they thought, ‘Well, the Taliban do not have an international agenda and they are not a threat any longer for the US and the Western allies.’ But the reality is that the Taliban are hosting all these different regional groups who all have regional and international agendas. So it will be just a matter of time before everything gets out of control.”
In his Cipher Brief piece, Pitts, the former CIA officer, argued for an international approach to the issue, including the U.S. and many countries in the region.
“This requires information sharing on ISIS-K, Al Qaeda, and other regional terrorist groups that are a high priority for these countries; the provision of appropriate technology that enables collaboration; and sustained intelligence, security, and analytic exchanges,” Pitts wrote. “Our partners closest to Afghanistan have the most to lose, but much to contribute toward support for a way forward in Afghanistan, and our sustained engagement will make a difference.”
Among those "partners," Pitts singled out Pakistan.
“The U.S. and Pakistan disagree on a number of issues, but there is a common interest in counterterrorism, regional stability, and economic development across the region. Pakistan must review its approach to Afghanistan and place better controls over the madrassahs that enable extremism, and violence that contributes to instability in Afghanistan and the region.”
Becky Root, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan during a 15-year tenure at the CIA, also weighed in via a Cipher Brief piece last week, arguing that it was time for the U.S. to engage directly with the Taliban, for all the discomfort that might bring.
“Rather than allowing countries such as China and Russia to take the lead on engaging with Afghanistan, the United States should seek talks with the Taliban administration to see if we can find some common ground,” Root said. She added that “while we are unlikely to ever see a Western-leaning, democratic government in Kabul, at least not in my lifetime,” it was worth the engagement to avoid worst-case scenarios. “The future of Afghanistan certainly depends on it, and the world’s own stability and security likely also hinges on it.”
Saraj warned of the "dangerous path" of "normalizing" the Taliban, and said that any dialogue with the group should come only if the group shows some signs of cooperation. His ultimate hope is for international engagement that reduces Taliban power, and thus limits the safe havens and other benefits that the jihadist organizations have gained.
“Any diplomatic solution like this, to dilute the Taliban control of everything, will be good for the neighborhood, will be good for the U.S. and everywhere," he said. "Because it is a developing storm. And unless we come together to stop it, at some point we will see the effects of it.”
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