The terrorist group does not have the capability to launch attacks from within the country against the United States, the assessment said. Instead, he said, al-Qaeda will rely, at least for now, on a number of loyal affiliates outside the region to carry out potential terrorist plots against the West. However, several counterterrorism analysts said the intelligence agencies’ judgments represented an optimistic picture of a complex and rapidly evolving terrorist landscape. The assessment, a declassified summary of which was provided to The New York Times, represents the consensus views of US intelligence agencies. “The assessment is essentially accurate, but it is also the most positive outlook for a threat picture that is still quite fluid,” said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former top UN counter-terrorism official. The assessment was prepared after Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida’s top leader, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul last month. The death of al-Zawahri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorist leaders, after a decades-long manhunt was a major victory for President Biden, but it immediately raised questions about al-Zawahri’s presence in Afghanistan a year after the withdrawal of Mr. Biden American forces are paving the way for the Taliban to regain control of the country. Republicans have said the president’s departure has put the United States at risk. That the al Qaeda leader felt safe enough to return to the Afghan capital, they argued, was a sign of a failed policy that they predicted would allow al Qaeda to rebuild training camps and plan attacks despite the Taliban’s pledge to deny the group a safe haven. . Last October, a top Pentagon official said al Qaeda could regroup in Afghanistan and attack the United States in one to two years. Administration officials pushed back on the latest criticism, noting the commitment Mr. Biden made when he announced al-Zawahri’s death. “As President Biden has said, we will continue to be vigilant, along with our partners, to defend our nation and ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National White House Security. he said in an email on Saturday. But some outside counterterrorism experts saw the new intelligence assessment as overly hopeful. A UN report warned this spring that al Qaeda had found “increased freedom of action” in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power. The report noted that several al-Qaeda leaders were likely living in Kabul and that an increase in al-Zawahri’s public statements suggested he was able to lead more effectively after the Taliban took power. “This seems like an overly rosy assessment to the point of being slightly myopic,” Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a New York-based security consultancy, said of the intelligence analysis. He added that the summary said “little about al Qaeda’s long-term prospects.” Al-Zawahri’s death has once again put the spotlight on al-Qaeda, which since the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011 has been largely overshadowed by an original rival, the Islamic State. Many terrorism analysts said Saif al-Adel, a senior Qaeda leader wanted by the FBI in the 1998 bombings of two United States embassies in East Africa, was likely to succeed al-Zawahri. He is believed to be living in Iran. “Fundamentally, I find the IC’s assessment persuasive,” said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University, referring to the US intelligence community and its new analysis of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Mr. Byman has previously expressed skepticism about a resurgent Qaeda threat. But other counterterrorism experts disagreed. One point of contention concerned claims in the intelligence summary that al-Qaida had not rebuilt its threat network in Afghanistan and that al-Zawahri was the only major figure to try to restore al-Qaida’s presence in the country when he and his family he settled in Kabul. year. “Zawahri was al Qaeda’s leader, so protecting him from the Taliban while providing more active guidance to the group was in itself reconstitution,” Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, wrote in an email. . “This approach fails to explain the organization of al-Qaeda today and the fact that even a small number of key leaders can leverage Afghanistan to politically direct the group’s network of affiliates,” Mr Mir wrote. “Al Qaeda does not need large training camps to be dangerous.” Some counterterrorism experts also disputed government analysts’ assessment that fewer than a dozen Qaeda members with long-term ties to the group are in Afghanistan, and that most of those members were likely there before the fall of the Afghan government last summer. “The numbers of active, hardline al Qaeda in AfPak are meaningless,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan. “At least three dozen senior Qaeda commanders were freed from Afghan prisons a year ago. I very much doubt if they have turned to farming or accounting as their profession after prison.’ Mr. Hoffman said Qaeda operatives or their affiliates had been given significant administrative responsibilities in at least eight Afghan provinces. He suggested the timing of the government’s assessment was “to divert attention from the disastrous consequences of last year’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan”. The intelligence summary also said that members of Qaeda’s affiliate in Afghanistan, formerly known as Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, or AQIS, were largely inactive and focused mostly on activities such as media production. However, a UN report in July estimated that the Qaeda affiliate had between 180 and 400 fighters – “mainly from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan” – who were in several Taliban combat units. “We know from a number of sources that AQIS has been involved in the Taliban insurgency against the US as well as operations against ISIS-K,” Mr Mir said, referring to the Islamic State group in Afghanistan, a fierce rival of al Qaeda. There was broad agreement on at least two key points in the intelligence summary, including that al Qaeda does not yet have the ability to attack the United States or American interests from Afghan soil. A U.N. report in July agreed with that decision, explaining that al-Qaeda “is not considered to pose an immediate international threat from its safe haven in Afghanistan because it lacks an external operational capability and does not currently wish to cause international difficulty or embarrassment to the Taliban. .” And government analysts as well as outside terrorism experts agreed that al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in the short term, would likely call on a number of partners outside the region to carry out plots. None of these affiliates pose the same kind of threat to the American homeland that al-Qaeda did on September 11, 2001. But they are deadly and resilient. Qaeda’s affiliate in East Africa killed three Americans at a US base in Kenya in 2020. A Saudi Air Force officer trained in Florida killed three sailors and wounded eight other people in 2019. The officer acted alone but was in contact with the Qaeda branch in Yemen as he completed his attack plans.
