forced the U.S. military<\/a> to develop new ways to get evacuees to the airport in Kabul. The Taliban and IS have fought each other in the past, but the worry now is that Afghanistan could again be a safe harbor for multiple extremists determined to attack the U.S. or other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPresident Joe Biden has spoken repeatedly of what he calls an \u201cover-the-horizon capability\u201d that he says will enable the U.S. to keep track of terrorism threats from afar. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters Monday that Biden has been clear that counterterrorism capabilities have evolved to the point where the threat can be suppressed without a strong boots-on-the-ground presence. He said the intelligence community does not believe al-Qaida currently has the capability to attack the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The U.S. is also presumably anticipating that strengthened airport screening and more sophisticated surveillance can be more effective than 20 years ago in thwarting an attack. But experts worry that intelligence-gathering capabilities needed as an early-warning system against an attack will be negatively affected by the troop withdrawal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An added complication is the sheer volume of pressing national security threats that dwarf what the U.S. government was confronting before the Sept. 11 attacks. These include sophisticated cyber operations from China and Russia that can cripple critical infrastructure or pilfer sensitive secrets, nuclear ambitions in Iran and an ascendant domestic terrorism threat laid bare by the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FBI Director Chris Wray has described that home-grown threat as \u201cmetastasizing,\u201d with the number of arrests of white supremacists and racially motivated extremists nearly tripling since his first year on the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy concern is that you can\u2019t compare 2001 to today,\u201d said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. There\u2019s a \u201cmuch vaster and better organized bureaucracy,\u201d he said, but it\u2019s burdened with demands not specifically tied to terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hoffman said that although he didn\u2019t think al-Qaida would be able to quickly use Afghanistan as a launchpad for attacks against the U.S., it may re-establish \u201cits coordinating function\u201d in the region to work with and encourage strikes by its affiliates \u2014 a patient strategy that may yet be vindicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTerrorist groups don\u2019t conform to train timetables or flight schedules,\u201d Hoffman said. \u201cThey do things when it suits them and, as al-Qaida was doing, they quietly lay the foundation in hopes that that foundation will eventually affect or determine their success.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The concern is resonant enough that Biden administration officials told Congress last week that, based on the evolving situation,\u00a0they now believe terror groups like al-Qaida\u00a0may be able to grow much faster than expected. In June, the Pentagon\u2019s top leaders said an extremist group like al-Qaida may be able to regenerate in Afghanistan and pose a threat to the U.S. homeland within two years of the American military\u2019s withdrawal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sept. 11 attacks made al-Qaida the most internationally recognizable terror group, but in the past decade at least, the most potent threat inside the U.S. has come from individuals inspired by the Islamic State, resulting in deadly massacres like the ones in\u00a0San Bernardino, California, and\u00a0Orlando.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But al-Qaida hardly disappeared. U.S. authorities\u00a0alleged last year\u00a0that a Saudi gunman who killed three U.S. sailors at a military base in Florida in 2019 had communicated with al-Qaida operatives about planning and tactics. Last December, the Justice Department\u00a0charged a Kenyan man\u00a0with trying to stage a 9\/11-style attack on the U.S. on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now it\u2019s possible that other extremists will find themselves inspired by al-Qaida, even if not directed by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cUntil recently, I would have said that the threat from al-Qaida core is pretty modest. They didn\u2019t have safe haven in Afghanistan, their senior leadership was scattered,\u201d said Nathan Sales, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, now with the Taliban back in control, \u201call of that could change and could change very rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The lightning-fast changes in Afghani […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":758,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions\/758"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}