BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — The withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan three years ago led to the fall of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, the return of the Taliban to power and – in the last stages of the withdrawal – a terrorist attack at the Kabul airport that killed 200 people, including 13 members of the U.S. military. The recent anniversaries of these events have been marked by somber ceremonies in the U.S. and a Taliban-led military parade in Kabul – in which the group showed off U.S. military hardware that had belonged to the previous government.
The Cipher Brief spoke to several experts to ask a pair of questions: What has Taliban rule meant for Afghanistan? And how grave is the threat posed by jihadist groups that are once again operating in the country?
THE CONTEXT
The decision to leave Afghanistan was bipartisan. The Trump administration brokered the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan, known as the Doha Accord, with the Taliban on February 29, 2020 to end the war in Afghanistan. The Biden administration implemented the deal, announcing on April 14, 2021 that U.S. forces would fully withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the war.
But by early 2021, the Taliban was in its strongest military position it had been in decades, and the U.S. had only 2,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan – its lowest number since 2001. As the year wore on, the Taliban captured several cities, and ultimately entered Kabul on August 15.
What followed was the collapse of the government and a chaotic rush to evacuate American personnel and the Afghans who had worked for the U.S. mission. In the last stages of the evacuation, on August 26, a bomb exploded at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul Airport, killing the 13 Americans and more than 180 others. The Islamic State Khorasan – or ISIS-K – claimed responsibility.
As the Americans left, President Joe Biden said boots on the ground wouldn’t be needed to protect the U.S. from terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan. “We are developing a 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 act quickly and decisively if needed,” Biden said.
Three years later, that “over-the-horizon” approach has been tested, as more than a dozen jihadist groups are once again operating in Afghanistan. A former top Afghan intelligence official told The Cipher Brief that the Taliban had afforded safe haven to several of the groups, creating what he called "a jihadist utopia" in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, poverty and the loss of basic rights have been hallmarks of Taliban rule thus far.
Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski spoke to four experts with deep experience and knowledge about Afghanistan: General Frank McKenzie, who led U.S. Central Command during those difficult days in 2021; Dave Pitts, a top CIA official in the region who was one of the last Americans to leave Kabul; former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin; and Hassan Abbas, a National Defense University Professor and scholar of the Taliban.
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Lost under Taliban rule: “20 years of gain”
Pitts: We were there for two decades. If you look at the government institutions, intelligence organizations, the military, the thriving private sector, colleges and universities and education for Afghans around the country – in that last year there, our Afghan colleagues used to talk about “20 years of gain,” and the concern that they were going to lose it.
And I look at where we are today – all of those things went away and I worry that almost all of them have gone away permanently.
A lot of the private sector tried to hang on. There were small businesses and even women's-owned businesses that thrived for a while until the Taliban put them out of business. If you look at the rights of Afghan citizens, the ability for humanitarian aid to get around the country with the limitations placed on that by the Taliban, almost making women disappear with their latest edicts – it’s far beyond just the lost institutions. It's really the rights and freedoms that the Afghan citizens had and now no longer have.
McLaughlin: Nothing good is going on there. At least when we were there, despite the tragic nature of much of it, some good things were going on. I'm not arguing against the withdrawal because I understand the motives for it, but the condition of women was much better. We were able by virtue of an extensive on-the-ground presence to monitor the growth of terrorist organizations and limit them.
I'm not saying that was a happy time – I've had a lot of students who've served there, and very few of them have good things to say about their experience or their judgment of the war. But the bottom line is that some good things were happening while we were there. Schools were built and medical facilities were better, and women went to school and had professional roles and were active in everything from small business to the media. That's all over. Now, girls go to school up until sixth grade if they're lucky. Women have very few professional opportunities from a human rights point of view. It's pretty dreadful.
Abbas:It’s been a long three years for the people of Afghanistan – especially women, children, and other ordinary people for whom things have gone from bad to worse. Things were not in great shape before, under the (U.S.-backed) Ashraf Ghani government. But now, especially with everything blocked out for women – no opportunities, no jobs, no colleges, no schools – they are going through a very terrible phase. So for many people in Afghanistan, it's been a long three years.
But today, the Taliban are not going anywhere, whether we like them or not. We in the West may be sick and tired of the battle and all the “war on terror” years, but the Taliban are totally focused on what they want to do with Afghanistan.
Also, this time around, they were able to benefit from some of the infrastructure that we built in Afghanistan. Most of that was never destroyed. Kabul was not burned. The Taliban walked into those offices, tried to hire people who were trained already, made their own middle-ranking leaders the managers.
I call this Taliban 3.0. Taliban 1.0 was the initial movement, and then from 2001 to 2021, the 2.0 version, they ran a successful insurgency. So the needs were different. We thought that they were totally focused on fighting Afghan forces and fighting the Western forces.
But apparently they were thinking through some of these governance issues as well.
That said, they are not really succeeding in any great ways because there's such poverty.
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Assessing the terror threat
Gen. McKenzie: I would say the primary threat from Afghanistan today is ISIS-K. The Taliban actually have a theological disagreement with ISIS, and they attacked them before we left the fight with varying degrees of success. They're having less success now, because back then we were able to provide some tipping and cueing to the Taliban in those attacks. It was in both our interests to reduce ISIS. Now they don't have that. Their attacks against ISIS have generally been ineffective.
But the other thing is that our ability to know and understand these groups has gone to almost zero. We have very little insight into what's actually happening inside Afghanistan, in terms of things that really depend on having people on the ground to go out and do the retail work, if you will, of intelligence gathering. That's all gone and it's not going to come back. So our ability to see and understand is quite limited.
Pitts: When ISIS-K got started, it was a multi-ethnic multinational organization in Afghanistan, with grassroots connections. They didn't have to bring in a lot of foreigners to form ISIS-K. And so it built these really strong networks, and it has proven to be an equal-opportunity recruiter of individuals, and that's helped it along the way. It's shown that in the attack on Russia (in March 2024), where it had people who could cross the border and get very close to this target without arousing suspicion. So they recruited the right people, did some very good planning to make that happen.
The Taliban is trying to take action against ISIS-K, but ISIS is very adaptive. It's got this connection across the fabric of Afghanistan. It’s resisting the Taliban efforts. So I think it's absolutely a credible threat we have to pay very close attention to.
McLaughlin: Obviously today it's not like it was before 9-11 in Afghanistan, but many of the conditions that were present before 9-11 are present now, in the sense that you have a government in charge that is radical.
The Taliban are at the extreme end of the Islamic extremist movement, not so much as terrorists, but more in the way they interpret their faith and apply it to people. So you've got that. You have a terrorist safe haven that is interrupted only by the fact that there is animosity between the Taliban government and the one terrorist group, ISIS-K. But while the Taliban strenuously opposes and fights ISIS-K, ISIS-K has nonetheless been successful in operating outside of Afghanistan.
Can they attack us? Well, certainly we'd have to consider ourselves vulnerable in Europe and in Africa to affiliates of ISIS generally, and ISIS-K for sure. Might they try and come here? Our defenses are good, but one thing I came away from my time in counterterrorism believing is that someone can always get through if they are determined enough and ingenious enough. Our defenses are so much better than they were in the early part of the last decade, but I still think we have to have our guard up.
Gen. McKenzie: I think we should be worried. The threat is growing. ISIS-K does aspire to attack us in our homeland. They will try to do it. And again, there are a couple of ways they can do that. The easiest way to do it is to inspire somebody here in the United States, to do that online, just pick up a weapon, go somewhere and conduct an act of terrorism. Bloody mess for them, can't control it very well, but it is an act of terror and it's also the hardest to stop.
The risk to ISIS is that our ability to discover it goes up considerably when they have to communicate inside the United States.
But the risk is there. I think the risk is increasing. It is greater this year than it was last year. It will be greater next year than it was this year. And again, our ability to actually look into Afghanistan itself makes it very hard to know and understand what they're thinking.
McLaughlin: Then you have the other major terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, and the difference there is that they're close to the Taliban, integrated with the Taliban. The one big success we've had against Al-Qaeda was the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri on the balcony of his residence in Kabul (in 2022). But the residence was provided by essentially a member of the Taliban government, the Haqqanis. And so his presence there illustrated pretty dramatically that Al-Qaeda is welcome there, supported there, including by those who are integrated into the Taliban government.
Pitts: Al-Qaeda never left Afghanistan. They certainly took a pounding in the combined efforts of the US and NATO and our Afghan colleagues and other countries, who really decimated Al-Qaeda inside Afghanistan. But they stayed. They went into a survival mode, and because they're fully supported by the Taliban, they could hide and hunker and be kept safe by the Taliban. They go back for well beyond 20 years. They share the same very harsh ideology.
After the (October 7) Hamas attacks, Saif al-Adel, the de facto head of Al-Qaeda, came out pretty strongly reminding everyone about their goal to attack the United States and attack the West. They've been using October 7 and what followed to expand their recruiting efforts, and what we see Al-Qaeda trying to do is take the Hamas attacks and somehow show themselves to be the global terrorist leader. And they're trying to rally global terrorists against the United States and the West and Israel and others. They are definitely trying to be relevant at a time when everyone's paying attention.
If you're Al-Qaeda and you've been waiting for the Taliban to be in charge of Afghanistan for 20 years, you're not going to miss this opportunity to reestablish yourself.
Abbas: We are hearing about a number of people from Al Qaeda going back into Afghanistan, and other militant groups as well. However, there's one big difference today. The earlier rule of the Taliban – Taliban 1.0 – they lacked infrastructure, and a law enforcement infrastructure of their own. Kabul was a new world to them. They had grown up during the Afghan jihad years, from the 1980s to 2001.
This time around, while the militants and extremist groups are still there, it's not like the previous era, when those who were given sanctuary were free to do whatever they wanted, as Al Qaeda did. This time around, the various Taliban leaders may have a group that they favor, but each has been made responsible for those groups – meaning that whoever were your friends during the insurgency years, and whoever you are allowing to be back there, you will be held responsible if they cross a red line.
The Taliban made a commitment to the U.S. in Doha (in 2020), after the U.S. told them, You are going to be responsible if there's ever a terror attack in Europe or against the homeland in the U.S. that originates from Afghanistan.
McLaughlin: Does the Taliban want any of these groups to attack the United States? I don't think so. They surely have learned that if that were to happen, we would come back with ferocity and they would go through the same exile that they experienced the last time, although probably worse.
General McKenzie: I think Al-Qaeda's in a reconstitution mode right now, I think they're on their back heel, but the atmosphere is very congenial to them now in Afghanistan. I would say the greater threat today is ISIS-K, but we need to keep our eye on Al-Qaeda because of their historical, long-term, demonstrated ability to survive and weather the storm, and to carry out massive attacks on the West. All those things are still there and so we'd be remiss if we didn't continue to observe them, within the very profoundly limited capabilities that we have now.
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Can “Over the Horizon” work?
Gen. McKenzie: In the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021, we had an extended debate on this subject and my argument was then and remains now that to think about “over the horizon” into a landlocked country like Afghanistan, several hundred miles from the sea – it is not impossible to do that, but it is very hard, and here's why: You have to locate a target, you have to know where that person is, and that requires that you either do that through human intelligence, signal intelligence, maybe imagery intelligence.
So you've got to find that person there, and then you've got to fix that target. By that I mean, now you have to develop a solution to it. You have to do the analysis so that when and if we choose to do a strike, it's going to be done in accordance with the law of armed conflict. We're going to take collateral damage into account. We're going to do a variety of things. It's very hard to do all that if you don't have agents on the ground that are responsive to immediate tasking, it's very hard to do it if you don't have a local security force that asks questions.
McLaughlin: We argued when we left that we could monitor this remotely, but to me, when it comes to counterterrorism, virtual presence is sometimes no presence. Most of what we learned when we were there, we learned from agents on the ground and close-in observation by special operations and so forth. Yes, you can monitor the country well with overhead photography, but your response time is not as assured or rapid as it is when you are present on the ground.
Gen. McKenzie: We have history in Afghanistan with this – policymakers going back to the Clinton administration, they loved the Tomahawk cruise missile, because no U.S. person's at risk when you launch it. And we actually tried to strike Osama Bin Laden under President Clinton's leadership in the 1990’s, and with the three-hour time of flight, he's in the next valley having dinner by the time that the cruise missiles arrive.
You can choose to do it with manned aircraft. Problem with manned aircraft is, if you're over the target and you're deep in Afghanistan, if you have a problem with your manned aircraft, there is no way to get the crew out. That becomes a very risky decision for any U.S. president to take.
The third way is even riskier: The idea of a raid.
Everybody was enamored with the Bin Laden raid. The more you look at it, the more you realize how risky that was. First, we lost a helicopter. We were able to accommodate that because we were based across the border in Afghanistan. So we had resources that we could apply immediately.
The point I used to make with policymakers was, if you think about a raid in Afghanistan, you should think about the raid into Tehran in 1980, where we went long distances with very finite margins for failure and in fact we did fail. That operation is much more illustrative of the danger of putting boots on the ground way, way deep inside a country in order to do a detailed raid like that. People talk about that very lightly. The more you study it, the more concerned you become about the ability to execute those operations.
So “over the horizon” sounds beguiling. It sounds clinical, it sounds like a video game. It is none of those things and we should be very aware of that.
Should the U.S. engage with the Taliban?
Pitts: I think what the United States is doing is what the United Nations and most other countries are doing – a transactional engagement with the Taliban on individual issues, recognizing when you're going into those engagements that you don't have much leverage.
But it's important for us to talk to the Taliban. We have to do that. There are some things we need to be able to address in real time about our interests there – U.S. citizens who remain in the country, and humanitarian issues. So there's reasons to talk directly to the Taliban.
But what we shouldn't be doing is anything that moves an inch closer to normalization with the Taliban or rewarding the regime.
I also think the challenge we have is that we're only talking to the Taliban. What I would like for us to do is to engage all of those Afghans that were our colleagues and partners and in many cases, friends, for the past two decades in Afghanistan who are now practically in exile around the world.
Those are the people who were building that country, working in those institutions, in the private sector, in civil society. These are the people who know Afghanistan and are a good partner for the United States and the United Nations and the international community in dealing with the Taliban. I would like to see something like the legitimate political opposition to the Taliban emerge, and it be given some space and room to grow a little bit, and that it gets some recognition from the U.S. and the international community, so we can have more informed voices that we know are absolutely trying to move Afghanistan toward a better future.
Gen. McKenzie: I would oppose anything that moves toward normalization right now. This is going to be a matter of time to play out. The danger is that over time other countries begin to make accommodations because of the vast mineral resources that are inside Afghanistan, among other reasons. Other countries are going to go in there and they're not going to care about human rights conditions, particularly the countries that we're talking about. I'm talking about China as much as anybody else.
Pitts: It is interesting to watch China and Russia. Russia's got its own long history there, but they stayed at bay until they knew we were leaving, and then they made some bold steps in the country. Certainly you see China doing that. And remember, this is where the “great game” started, if you just think about the crossroads that this represented. I think the potential for surrogate activities against the United States to take place in this region are high.
That's not to say we should rush in and try to do something different, it just means we should be watching that very closely.
Abbas: China and the region are already actively engaged with the Taliban. As are several Central Asian states – they have huge issues with them over water distribution, but the Central Asians are still talking to them. And they are trying to benefit from trade opportunities that are coming their way as well, between South Asia and Central Asia. India is engaging with them as well.
So the region is working with them. China is working with them primarily because some extremists with Chinese roots are still in Afghanistan. And China is very concerned that they'll go back and that they will support militancy or insurgency in China as well. So the region is engaged with them because of trade and because of security.
And the security issue is our big concern as well. We cannot afford to have the Islamic State resurrect itself, and that's happening in some ways already. So our case for engagement is, number one, security-related.
Secondly, we spent so much (on Afghanistan), that for us to be totally absent – I cannot see how that argument goes. Yes, we are saying no to diplomatic recognition, and our ambassador is not going to be landing in Kabul with full fanfare, but we are already meeting them secretly. In fact, the Taliban intelligence chief lost a bit of credibility because he's seen as talking to Americans too much. There's some belief that there has been signal intelligence sharing as well.
So I would argue for more engagement, and continued engagement through the UN and other circles. It is in our security interest to be talking to them more.
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