Is global terror making a comeback?

Publishing date: 29 March 2024

Published in: Fin Times

History appears to be turning full circle. The new haven of global T groups, incl al-Qaeda and Isis, has turned out to be the old one Afg. This had already been observed last summer when a United Nations report found “str and symbiotic ties” b/w the Tbn and a rebounding al-Qaeda. It did not get much attention then. It is only now because of last wk’s Isis-Khorasan attk on Moscow’s Crocus theatre which was Russia’s worst T incident in more than two decades, taking more than 140 lives that we are sitting up and taking notice. The frustrating thing is that Afg’s reversion to its role as the host and incubator of cross-border Islamist terror was entirely foreseeable. It was precisely what Joe Biden was warned against in 2021 when he decided to uphold Donald Trump’s Doha deal and pull out of Afg.
▪️The arguments in def of America’s precipitous exit sounded as bad three yrs ago as they do now. Top of these was that Biden was honouring a deal that he inherited from Trump. Such fidelity did not stop him from rightly abandoning other Trump legacies, such as the withdrawal from the WHO and the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s deal with the Tbn was a terrible one. He let out thousands of Ts from Afg jails and either cynically or gullibly took the Tbn’s word that they would deny a sanctuary to al-Qaeda. People also argued that the US was needlessly losing lives in Afg in a hopeless cause. That was false on two counts. There were no US combat deaths in the 18 months preceding America’s withdrawal. Its footprint had already shrunk considerably. Second, the cause was counterterrorism. The US had long since abandoned any fond notions of bldg a thriving liberal democracy in Afg. America’s sole purpose was to prevent the return of the Tbn. It was working.
▪️ The other two arguments in Biden’s def were that the Tbn was a reformed and moderated force the so-called Tbn 2.0. They would probably even permit girls to stay on at school and women to remain in the labour force. Both claims were rapidly belied. Finally, Washington blamed faulty int for the speed with which the Tbn regained power. Again, this was wrong. The CIA did not forecast to the day 4pm on Aug 15 2021 the Tbn’s return; but they gave it a high probability of happening. As we know, scores of people incl 13 US servicemen were killed by a T attk at Kabul airport. It was carried out by Isis-K, which also perpetrated last wk’s attk in Moscow. I am generally an admirer of Biden but when he is wrong he can be very wrong. If the US had kept a light footprint in Afg, the Afg National Army would not have deserted its posts and defected to the Tbn. The picture would look very diff today.
▪️ Now we are in danger of heading back to square one. Anyone wanting to know the extent to which both al-Qaeda and Isis-K are thriving in Afg though one is the Tbn’s friend, and the other its enemy should read this fine Foreign Policy piece by Lynne O’Donnell. She points out that al-Qaeda has collected $194mn in revenue from a network of Afg gold mines it partially controls. For a notoriously efficient and patient T gp, this is serious cash. Remember it only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to carry out the 9/11 attks. One piece of good news, the 2022 drone strike that took out Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as head of the gp, also illustrates the underlying bad news. Al-Zawahiri was killed at a villa in Kabul that belongs to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the Haqqani network who is also the Tbn’s minister of the interior. The Tbn is not even trying to hide its alliance with al-Qaeda.
▪️ None of this means we should necessarily expect a new wave of attks on the west. But we should certainly be on our guard. This wk, France put its security svcs on high alert ahead of the Paris Olympics, which Emmanuel Macron said would be a tgt. Germany and Belgium say they have foiled recent Isis-K plots. Most imp, the war in Gaza threatens to radicalise a new generation of Muslims against America and the west. As Hegel said (my apologies: I quote this too often): “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” Gideon, do you agree with the premise of this note? If so, do you think it is time we restocked our depleted counterterrorism ranks?