Biden and Trump administrations didn't miss ISIS-K threat – they ignored it, experts say
The Biden administration barely mentioned ISIS-K when discussing U.S. plans for withdrawal from Afghanistan spring, then downplayed its capabilities until last week’s deadly attacks were imminent.
The Trump administration glossed over the regional affiliate of the Islamic State terrorist group, too, boasting before the 2020 election that its peace deal with the Taliban would doom the murderous offshoot without putting U.S. troops at risk.
By claiming that ISIS-K posed little or no danger to Americans on U.S. soil, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden turned their focus elsewhere during the long drawdown that culminated in Monday’s official end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
That position proved disastrous, according to more than a dozen current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials, citing last Thursday’s horrific attacks that killed 13 American service members at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and other alarming intelligence on the group.
ISIS-K was nearly neutralized by 2019 thanks to joint U.S. and Afghan counterterrorism efforts, but it regrouped and morphed into a splintered, urban-based network that poses dangers to American interests overseas – and potentially on U.S. soil, experts said.
The threat from ISIS-K is likely to rise exponentially without a robust U.S. intelligence and military presence in Afghanistan to keep it in check.
“This was a perfect storm that played totally into ISKP’s capabilities,” Douglas London, the CIA’s former top Afghanistan counterterrorism official, said, referring to Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP, as the terrorist organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan is formally known. “When you have a group that is decentralized and hard to find in the first place, and then all of a sudden the pressure against them is gone, the government is gone and the CIA and the troops are essentially gone, they’re now free to do whatever they want.”
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Afghanistan as a breeding ground
Biden defended the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Tuesday, saying America's longest war needed to end and Americans would be safer as a result – including from terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida.
"To ISIS-K, we are not done with you yet," Biden said from the White House. "As commander in chief, I firmly believe the best path to guard our safety and our security lies in a tough, unforgiving, targeted, precise strategy that goes after terror where it is today, not where it was two decades ago."
However, current and former counterterrorism officials said Afghanistan is one of those places, just as it was before the attacks Sept. 11, 2001, on New York and Washington.
"Al-Qaida was only a threat to us overseas, too, until 2,900 people were dead," said London, a 34-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service. "So it's a one-sided view that a group like ISKP is just going to stop in place and say, 'You know what? We're not going to do anything externally.' Of course they have external capabilities. They've been involved in external activities (outside Afghanistan) since 2016."
London and other officials said the Kabul airport attack and the hasty U.S. evacuation effort have given ISIS-K the kind of once-in-a-generation recruiting and fundraising tool that most terrorist groups can only dream of.
“The worry is that the attack gives ISKP an opening and that they are able to form this narrative of, ‘We're the ones who actually got the Americans out of the country and the foreign forces out of country, not these Western patsies the Taliban,’” said one congressional staffer who focuses on Afghanistan counterterrorism issues.
That makes ISIS-K a far more attractive alternative to the Taliban and even al-Qaida for the thousands of Islamic militants streaming into Afghanistan to exploit the vacuum created by the collapse of the government.
London, who retired from the CIA in early 2020, worries that the broader Islamic State network could look to Afghanistan as an even better caliphate stronghold than it had in Iraq and Syria in 2015 before the U.S. military destroyed it.
“As they become stronger and more capable, they will most certainly pursue external operations” against U.S. targets, said London, author of the forthcoming book on CIA counterterrorism, “The Recruiter.”
'Biden and Trump disagreed on everything, except for one'
Now that the U.S. war is complete and investigations into the withdrawal are ramping up, U.S. intelligence and military officials deny that they missed the growing ISIS-K threat.
Officials said they spent the past five years doing everything they could to neutralize the group and warn top U.S. policymakers in the White House and Congress about the threat.
The Pentagon even used the U.S. government’s most powerful non-nuclear weapon – known as the Mother of All Bombs – on an ISIS-K tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan in 2017. A steady drumbeat of drone strikes and special operations missions hammered the terror group's operations center near the border with Pakistan. U.S.-led forces have killed more than 500 midlevel or senior ISIS-K leaders since 2015, London and others said.
But publicly highlighting the threat of ISIS-K was seen as a politically inconvenient factor for political leaders who had promised to withdraw from Afghanistan, current and former officials and private sector counterterrorism analysts said.
"Biden and Trump disagreed on everything except for one thing, and that was that we're ending the 'forever wars' and getting out of Afghanistan," counterterrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman said. "And anything that went against that policy conclusion was ignored or dismissed, with the tragic results that we've seen over the past few weeks and certainly on Thursday."
Hoffman, who has studied jihadist organizations and the U.S. response to them for nearly 50 years, said it was “profound wishful thinking” on the part of both administrations to think that ISIS-K and al-Qaida wouldn’t want to launch mass casualty attacks while the U.S. withdrawal was underway. “Something like this is just as terrorism always is: No one ever thinks about it until it happens, despite the fact this should have been staring everyone in the face,” Hoffman said. “Because if people had thought seriously about it, it would have been another reason to stay at Bagram” Airfield and delay the U.S. withdrawal.
National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said the Biden administration remained focused on al-Qaida and ISIS-K until the end. She referred USA TODAY to comments about the terror groups made by two top administration intelligence officials this year – Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns.
Those officials and others said Biden's national security team has always considered ISIS-K a threat within Afghanistan, but it focused more intensively on other terrorist groups that demonstrated more capability and intent to attack Americans on U.S. soil.
Biden himself suggested as such May 28 in a speech to military service members and their families at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia:
“As we draw down, we’re also going to focus on the urgent work of rebuilding over-the-horizon capabilities that’ll allow us to take out al-Qaida if they return to Afghanistan – but to focus on the threat that has metastasized,” Biden said. “The greatest threat and likelihood of attack from al-Qaida or ISIS is not going to be from Afghanistan; it’s going to be from five other regions of the world that have significantly more presence of both al-Qaida and organizational structures, including ISIS.”
That may be true, current and former counterterrorism officials said, but ISIS-K has a track record of launching mass casualty attacks against hospitals, schools and other "soft" civilian targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan since at least 2016.
Attacking bigger targets, American targets
When Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of U.S. Central Command, visited Afghanistan in February 2019, ISIS-K had emerged as a "very sophisticated and dangerous threat that we have to stay focused on," he said.
Despite preliminary negotiations between Washington and the Taliban regarding a potential peace settlement in Afghanistan, Votel said, "we have an enduring interest here to make sure that violent extremist groups in this part of the world can't be used to hurt Americans, American interests and American homeland."
One U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan told CNN that ISIS-K was actively recruiting from schools and mosques and using its new members' social media networks to acquire American contacts who might help with attacks on U.S. soil.
U.S. intelligence at the time showed that the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate in Iraq and Syria probably helped its Afghanistan offshoot, which had more than tripled in the past year to more than 5,000 fighters.
"We're very concerned about their capability and trajectory," Col. Dave Butler, the spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, told the Voice of America in May 2019. "IS-K has made it clear that they aspire to attack the United States and our allies."
As the Trump administration intensified its negotiations with the Taliban even some of the president's closest allies expressed concerns that ISIS-K and other terrorist groups could benefit.
"To trust the Taliban to control al-Qaida, ISIS-K and other radical Islamist groups present in Afghanistan – as a replacement for a U.S. counterterrorism force – would be a bigger mistake than Obama's Iranian nuclear deal," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said.
By mid-March 2020, U.S. and U.N. intelligence suggested the terror group's fighting force had been halved to about 1,000 fighters. The United States kept up maximum pressure on the group to make sure it didn't bounce back as it had done before, said Army Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, a Pentagon spokesman.
How ISIS-K made a comeback
When Trump cut his peace deal with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, it received little public scrutiny because the war wasn’t front page news. The United States promised to get out of Afghanistan within 14 months, and the Taliban pledged to cut ties with al-Qaida and not allow the country to become a haven for terrorist groups.
Trump agreed to release as many as 5,000 Taliban prisoners if the Taliban would set free 1,000 people, most of them Afghan government fighters.
That October, as the election loomed, national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Fox News that “when the history books write about this era ... President Trump is going to be viewed as one of the great peacemakers of American presidents” because of the agreement.
"You now have the Taliban fighting ISIS-K in Afghanistan,” O’Brien said, and “we haven't had a U.S. combat death in Afghanistan since February.”
By then, ISIS-K was devastated by the constant pounding by U.S. and Afghan military forces and from attacks by the Taliban, which considered it a competitor for Islamic fighters and public support. A succession of leaders had been killed, and it had lost its all-important base of operations in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces from which to recruit, train and plot attacks.
As U.S. troop numbers declined, so did CIA operational and analytical assets in country because they rely on the Pentagon for support and protection outside cities, current and former intelligence officials said.
ISIS-K and other terrorist groups began making a comeback in Afghanistan because the Taliban didn't live up to their part of the deal as the United States ratcheted down operations.
When then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in July 2020 that the Taliban were combating al-Qaida, the commander of U.S. Central Command publicly disagreed.
"Right now, it is simply unclear to me that the Taliban has taken any positive steps,” Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said.
The U.S. Treasury Department reported in January that "as of 2020, al-Qaida is gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban's protection."
In February, Edmund Fitton-Brown, coordinator of the United Nations monitoring team for the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, said "we have not seen any evidence" of the Taliban trying to suppress a potential terrorist threat.
The Islamic State was on the move, McKenzie said Feb. 8 at the Middle East Institute. He described the Islamic State and al-Qaida as drivers of instability “across Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.”
Despite ISIS-K’s losses, McKenzie said, “new leadership allowed it to stabilize and increase localized and lone wolf attacks throughout the second half of the year.”
As many as 10,000 foreign fighters streamed into Afghanistan from around the region and the Middle East, eager to join the Taliban, al-Qaida and ISIS-K as the U.S. withdrawal continued, according to U.N. monitoring reports.
The reports noted there were nearly four times as many ISIS-K attacks from January to April as during the same period in 2020, a jump from 21 to 77.
“The focus in the U.S. was always on Taliban and al-Qaida ever since the Trump administration signed the Doha deal, but ISKP had been quite active this year, and there was no good reason to ignore the threat it poses,” said Faran Jeffery, an open-source intelligence analyst in Pakistan. “Unfortunately, ISKP threat was downplayed until it became imminent.”
Other observers criticized the Trump and Biden administrations for ignoring the obvious and growing threat.
“It was very clear ISIS-K was becoming more active and more threatening and was benefiting from the chaos in Afghanistan," according to Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. "And as soon as U.S. and ANA (Afghan National Army) pressure dropped off, and with the Taliban concerned with just capturing the country, it shouldn't have been a surprise."
“No one was ever under any illusions about ISIS,” Hoffman said. “I mean look, they've attacked girls’ schools at hospitals. Why wouldn't they smell blood in the water with this opportunity?”
By early 2021, ISIS-K was targeting U.S. interests in Afghanistan and beyond. In mid-January, the Kabul government foiled an alleged ISIS-K plot to assassinate a top American diplomat to Kabul and senior Afghan officials. In a statement, the State Department said it was "aware of deeply troubling reports that members of ISIS-K were plotting to assassinate U.S. Charge d'Affaires Ambassador Ross Wilson."
'Flying blind' against ISIS-K
In the aftermath of last Thursday’s attacks, the Biden administration defended itself by saying it had few options, given Trump’s controversial agreement with the Taliban. It could honor the pact and finish the withdrawal or escalate a war that neither president – nor the American people – wanted.
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Michael "Mick" Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and CIA paramilitary operations officer, said there was a third option: to keep a few thousand troops in Afghanistan to help prop up the Kabul government’s counterterrorism agencies and continue military strikes against al-Qaida, ISIS-K and other terrorist organizations that threaten American interests.
“Like most people I know, I thought we should have kept the residual force, used our air components, SOF (special operations forces) components and intel components, reduce the amount of guys that are in harm's way but basically preserve what we – what I – fought for for 20 years and not just throw it all away,” said Mulroy, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq as a U.S. Marine.
London said the troop drawdown torpedoed the spy agency's efforts against ISIS-K, especially after the military shut down its Forward Operating Bases around the country. Even in Kabul, where ISIS-K was most dangerous, CIA capabilities were "significantly decreased because we were depending on leads coming in from throughout the country."
"We were flying blind against most activities" against ISIS-K, other terrorist groups and even the Taliban, London said. "And we were dependent on our local partner, which was scrambling for survival itself as the Taliban started rolling up provincial capital after capital."
ISIS-K regrouped so quickly by flattening its organizational structure and splitting up into many cells scattered across multiple provinces, said Jeffery, deputy director of the Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism, a U.K.-based anti-terrorism think tank.
Jeffery said ISIS-K’s network in Kabul is perhaps its strongest, consisting of “highly ideologically driven operatives” with a long track record of launching mass casualty attacks.
That capability should worry U.S. officials because ISIS-K is attracting more fighters by the day, including many from the Taliban. And it has indicated an interest in attacking targets – including American interests – in and outside Afghanistan.
“ISKP has long acted as a sort of headquarters of Islamic State in South and Central Asia,” Jeffery said. “It has attracted many foreign fighters over the years, including from U.S. partner countries like India, and these foreign fighters are the ones who could pose the most serious threat to U.S. interests outside of Afghanistan.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Did Biden, Trump administrations ignore ISIS-K threat in Afghanistan?
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