After Afghanistan: The Threat of Counterterrorism Fatigue

‘ We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago,” Joe Biden declared on August 31, 2021, following the bloody crescendo of his shambolic retreat from Central Asia. The Taliban had evolved from American adversary into a partner in peace, Biden averred, and they could be trusted to see to U.S. interests in the region. Besides, “the terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan,” Biden added. To the extent that the post-9/11 Global War on Terror continued at all, it would shift its focus to more active theaters of conflict elsewhere.

Two years later, the Biden administration remains committed to painting a rosy picture of the security threats metastasizing inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan. A new U.S. intelligence assessment released last week maintains that the Taliban are keeping their promises. It is “unlikely” that the theocratic Afghan government will allow al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself, the report claimed, and Kabul continues to degrade the Islamic State of Khorasan’s (ISIS-K) capacity to conduct attacks domestically or abroad. If the threat of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan’s safe harbors one day becomes more acute, the Biden White House insists that it retains robust “over the horizon” counterterror capabilities. Rest easy.

But the administration’s sunny outlook conflicts with the findings produced by the member states contributing to a recent United Nations Sanctions Monitoring Team report on the scope and scale of the terrorist threat the Taliban are incubating. Afghanistan remains “a place of global significance for terrorism, with approximately 20 terrorist groups operating in the country,” that report read. The constellation of organizations operating inside Afghanistan is still devoted to building “theocratic quasi-state entities” throughout the region.

Al-Qaeda’s capability to “conduct large-scale terror attacks remains reduced,” but its “intent remains firm.” The organization is in a “reorganization phase, establishing new training centers” across Afghanistan. It is developing operational links with terrorist organizations beyond Afghanistan’s borders, and it has recently begun calling for violent reprisals against targets affiliated with Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands in response to religious provocations.

ISIS-K is similarly committed to conducting external operations outside Afghanistan, though that goal is being frustrated by Taliban pressure. A variety of up-and-coming terrorist networks, including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and Khatiba al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, are operating across Afghanistan’s borders, attacking targets inside Pakistan and Tajikistan with the aim of destabilizing their governments.

The Biden White House took exception to the U.N. report, which one unnamed administration official called “an outlier within the U.N. system.” The official added that they have tried to “engage with those who produced” the “wildly out of whack” report and, maybe, “educate them back.” But the report is entirely consistent with the independently observable contours of the international threat environment. It notes that U.S.-led or U.S.-backed counterterrorism operations have “significantly suppressed or constrained terrorists’ capabilities domestically and their ability to mount external operations” in places such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Mozambique, and Somalia.

In short, counterterrorism operations counter terrorism. Where counterterrorism initiatives are falling short are places like Afghanistan, where efforts to interdict terrorist plots have been outsourced to untrustworthy entities like the Taliban.

Moreover, this U.N. estimate dovetails with the findings of a report produced for the National Intelligence Council and declassified by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in June. Her office’s somewhat less reassuring assessment of the situation in Afghanistan is that al-Qaeda will continue to conduct operations designed to “enable or inspire attacks elsewhere,” while the group itself will remain unable to conduct “direct external operations” but only “through 2024.”

This assessment is highly contingent on the Taliban’s posture toward al-Qaeda, and Kabul appears committed to keeping its al-Qaeda allies in check. But the United Nations notes that the organization’s members continue to “infiltrate law enforcement agencies and public administration bodies, ensuring the security of Al-Qaida cells dispersed throughout the country.” Indeed, the distinctions between al-Qaeda and the Taliban are blurred, as are the discrepancies between the competing terrorist organizations inside Afghanistan.

Nor is al-Qaeda the only terrorist outfit committed to reconstituting its capacity to conduct external operations. Back in March, a series of unauthorized intelligence leaks to the online messaging platform Discord revealed that “ISIS has been developing a cost-effective model for external operations that relies on resources from outside Afghanistan.” It’s diffuse organizational “model will likely enable ISIS to overcome obstacles — such as competent security services — and reduce some plot timelines, minimizing disruption opportunities.”

A lot has changed since 9/11. The West has developed a robust counterterrorism apparatus, which has proven proficient at intercepting communications and signals intelligence regarding potential plots and interdicting them either directly or via a global network of state partners. But those capabilities are eroding. Afghanistan has once again become a permissive environment in which terrorist groups operate openly, recruit and train operatives directly, and plot extensively.

Moreover, a sense of complacency has descended over lawmakers in Washington such that there is real potential that Congress will allow Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to expire at the end of the year. The civil-liberties issues that opponents of Section 702 often raise notwithstanding, the National Security Agency attributes nearly 60 percent of the items that appear on the President’s Daily Brief to intelligence gathered by mechanisms authorized via this provision. Allowing its legal authority to lapse would dramatically curtail authorities’ ability to collect intelligence on specific non-Americans operating outside the country.

A similar complacency is evident in the political landscape to which American lawmakers are uniquely attuned. One representative essay published in the Washington Post last week by Jessica Petrow-Cohen, whose formative early-childhood experiences were forged in the wake of 9/11, maintained that the fears of terrorism she grew up with “were valid but misplaced.” The real, acute threats weren’t Islamist radicals bent on mayhem and murder, she argued, but the “environmental toxins released during and after the World Trade Center attacks” and the domestic officials who failed to mitigate that menace.

That would be a comfort, but the global terrorist threat has not degraded all on its own. It has been degraded actively and only as a result of persistent effort. We have become adept at detecting terrorist plots, good at interdicting them, and very lucky in the pursuit of both objectives. “There’s no such thing as perfect security,” George W. Bush said in 9/11’s wake. “To attack us, the terrorists only have to be right once. To stop them, we need to be right 100 percent of the time.” The Islamist terrorist threat hasn’t receded so much as we have grown fatigued with the obligations associated with defending against it. Our enemies are not above exploiting our exhaustion.