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20 August 2018

Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden’s original Al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Wesley Morgan

The troops waging America’s 17-year-old war in Afghanistan are confronting a puzzle: What has become of the enemy who drew them there? Al Qaeda, the group whose Sept. 11 terrorist attacks provoked the U.S. invasion in 2001, has shrunk to relative obscurity among the military’s other missions in Afghanistan, supplanted by newer threats such as a local branch of the Islamic State. And it is a matter of debate how much Al Qaeda’s remaining Afghan presence still focuses on launching attacks overseas, according to current and former military officers and government officials, experts, and Afghans from areas where the group operates.

Only a small portion of the 15,000 American troops in Afghanistan are involved in the counterterrorism mission that the military calls its “core objective” there. Even fewer of those are hunting al Qaeda, whose presence in the country has dwindled after years of drone strikes. Instead, U.S. special operations forces are focusing on the Afghan branch of ISIS, a less secretive group that in some way offers an easier target.

The changing complexion of the American mission, aimed primarily at aiding the Afghan government in its civil war against the Taliban, underscores how the conflict has morphed away from its original focus: preventing a reprise of 9/11 and punishing its perpetrators. That was also the intent of Congress’ 2001 war authorization, which the Pentagon still relies on as it sends combat troops to countries across the Middle East and Africa.

“We have decimated Al Qaeda” in Afghanistan, the next American general set to take command of the U.S. and NATO mission told Congress in June. A military assessment published the same month concluded that the few senior Al Qaeda figures remaining in Afghanistan “are focused on their own survival,” while members of a local Al Qaeda subgroup are mainly helping the Afghan Taliban on the battlefield instead of plotting attacks abroad.

But some experts warn that it’s risky for the military to shift its focus from the group. They say Al Qaeda tries hard to fly under the radar and mask its true intentions, making it extremely difficult for U.S. intelligence agencies to track and assess.

“Al Qaeda may have decided, let’s forget about external attacks for the time being and focus inside Afghanistan on helping the Taliban,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has consulted for military counterterrorism units. “That may be a strategic decision for the moment, and then at some point down the road they shift back.”

Experts also say there is little evidence the Afghan ISIS branch is involved in planning attacks in the United States. The ISIS affiliate is mainly made up of Afghans and Pakistanis, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, and is fighting against both the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Under the Obama administration, the core task of the top-secret military counterterrorism task force in Afghanistan was to hunt a few members of Al Qaeda’s global leadership cadre. Those include a handful who U.S. intelligence believed were still, more than a decade after Sept. 11, actively coordinating future attacks on the West from isolated hideouts in the country’s rugged northeast.

But a military drone strike killed the senior-most of those operatives in late 2016. Since then, strikes against ISIS have far outpaced those against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, according to two special operations officers speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations.

“The Americans are still going after Al Qaeda with drone strikes and special operations here, but ISIS is more of a priority for them now,” said Bilal Sarwary, a parliamentary candidate and journalist from Kunar, a northeastern province with a longstanding Al Qaeda presence, in an interview.

Afghan officials say Al Qaeda activity in the area has also decreased after years of drone strikes. “There are very few Arabs in the mountains now. They are just trapped there,” Mawlawi Shahzada Shahid, a cleric from Kunar who has acted as a liaison between the government and Afghan insurgents, said in an interview last year. “They go to Syria and Libya and Iraq now instead of coming here.”

That matches with a 2017 military analysis that described an exodus of “key Al Qaeda personnel” from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Middle East. While the group would probably remain active in Afghanistan, the report predicted, “the future strategic direction of core Al Qaeda will likely align more closely with dynamics in the Levant,” a reference to a stronghold Al Qaeda has carved out amid the chaos of the Syrian civil war.

A United Nations Security Council report released last month suggested that Al Qaeda “military and explosives experts” recently moved from Afghanistan to Syria.

“From al-Qaida’s perspective, I don’t know why they would replace senior people in Afghanistan anymore when they are killed when Yemen and Syria are much more permissive for their purposes,” echoed Jonathan Schroden, director of the special operations program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a government-funded think tank.

But “I don’t think they’re ever going to go away from Afghanistan completely,” cautioned a senior special operations officer with counterterrorism experience there. “They’re great at going to ground and reappearing in other forms.”

That, say some experts who study Al Qaeda, is exactly what the group is doing in Afghanistan — switching its focus from a small group of foreign operatives secretly planning global attacks to a larger, newer regional subgroup, called Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.

Founded in 2015, the Indian Subcontinent subgroup has sometimes been dismissed as “not real Al Qaeda,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a terrorism analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — in part because it is composed mostly of locals, not the Arabs who fill many of Al Qaeda’s top positions.

While most senior Al Qaeda personnel “are trying to hide,” Gen. John Nicholson, the outgoing top commander in Kabul, said last year, the subgroup members are “more active” but are focused on training Taliban members who are fighting the Afghan government.

Afghanistan’s defense minister claimed this week that foreign militants were involved in the Taliban’s assault on the eastern city of Ghazni, the capital of a province where the Al Qaeda subgroup has operated alongside Taliban fighters in recent years.

The last time the military touted the death of a well-known Al Qaeda leader, it was a Pakistani national who was second-in-command of the subgroup. The military’s announcement of his death — in a strike outside Ghazni last December — described him as an adviser to the Taliban and made no mention of planning attacks outside Afghanistan.

By contrast, when a drone strike killed Al Qaeda‘s longstanding top commander in Afghanistan in 2016, a dual Saudi-Qatari national named Farouq al-Qahtani, the military said that he had been “directly involved in planning threats against the U.S. in the last year.”

Joscelyn said drawing a sharp distinction between the main group and the regional subgroup is a mistake. “There’s not a firm line between the personnel planning attacks overseas and those training local insurgents,” he said, noting that Qahtani, who was widely viewed as a member of Al Qaeda‘s management layer, had also been deeply involved in training local Taliban fighters.

The military insists it has never taken its eye off the Al Qaeda ball in Afghanistan, despite the scarcity of announced strikes against the group and the nearly two years that have passed since it announced the death of a well-known senior operative involved in external plotting.

“We’ve been actively hunting Al Qaeda from the lowest rifleman up to their emir and everyone in between,” Nicholson said in a POLITICO interview earlier this year.

A spokesman for Nicholson’s headquarters said military operations had killed 65 Al Qaeda members this year, but would not estimate how many were part of the subgroup or how many were foreigners. This week, U.S.-backed Afghan commandos reported killing an Al Qaeda operative — apparently an Egyptian — who had been assisting the Taliban in the south, far from the northeastern region the military has long described as the group’s main Afghan stronghold.

Yet Nicholson has also acknowledged that “the majority” of counterterrorism air strikes are now against ISIS targets.

Devoting more drones and other assets to striking ISIS in Afghanistan has left fewer resources to go after Al Qaeda, the two special operations sources said.

Until 2016, the counterterrorism force in Afghanistan was largely restricted to hunting Al Qaeda. But with a new ISIS branch storming through eastern Afghanistan, the Obama administration told the counterterrorism troops to use their lethal mix of drones and ground raids to blunt the offensive.

“The concern was that if the U.S. wasn’t careful, what happened in Mosul and Ramadi might happen in Afghanistan,” said Jones, the terrorism analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to ISIS’ 2014 rampage through Iraq. “The Washington priority became all ISIS” — even though, Jones said, there were few indications that ISIS fighters in Afghanistan had ambitions of launching attacks outside South Asia.

That’s still the case today. Asked this week whether ISIS’s Afghan branch poses a direct threat to the United States or Europe, U.S. Central Command leader Gen. Joseph Votel gave an ambiguous answer, saying there had “probably” been overseas plots linked to the Afghan group but that he couldn’t think of any.

Last month’s United Nations report suggested that “some recent plots detected and prevented in Europe had originated” with ISIS in Afghanistan, citing authorities in an unspecified country.

But the few pieces of public evidence, such as a 2016 plot to attack New York City, suggest that while ISIS leaders in Afghanistan may maintain indirect contact with homegrown militants who hatch their own plots overseas and then seek the group’s blessing, ISIS has not planned or ordered its own overseas attacks from Afghanistan, as Al Qaeda has.

The Army Rangers running the counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan have been eager to target ISIS, the two special operations sources said. That’s in part because, compared with Al Qaeda operatives who live in the mountains and are adept at avoiding surveillance, ISIS controls whole districts and can easily be spotted and struck from the air.

ISIS “became the focus because there was pressure from the top to clamp down on their expansion, and it was a target-rich environment,” said one of the officers. “With Al Qaeda, it was a lot of long-term development and surveillance — very labor-intensive.” But with ISIS, “you’d put up a drone, see some activity, and strike.”

That has continued into the Trump years. “We have the OK to go after a target set with a lot of low-hanging fruit, and that’s a lot more rewarding than developing Al Qaeda targets for months and months and then having maybe one shot at them,” said the second officer.

During the nearly two years since the last killing of a major Al Qaeda plotter in Afghanistan — Qahtani — the counterterrorism task force has killed a succession of top ISIS leaders in Afghanistan.

Divining the true intentions and capabilities of a particular branch of a covert group like Al Qaeda has always been difficult and “subjective” and always will be, said Jeff Eggers, a former Navy SEAL commander who was a senior Obama administration counterterrorism official. “Someone might assess that they have the intent but not the capability right up until the day they execute an attack in the West.”

It’s wise to treat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan as an international threat even if the evidence is ambiguous, agreed Joshua Geltzer, a former senior counterterrorism official in both the Obama and Trump administrations, because intelligence on the group’s true intentions is so scarce.

The intelligence community’s official assessment is that whether or not they are planning missions abroad, both the remaining members of the main Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan and their colleagues in the Afghan subgroup “maintain the intent to conduct attacks against the United States and the West.”

If Al Qaeda can’t be destroyed in Afghanistan, the default alternative for the military is “perpetual targeting to keep them in hiding,” said Eggers. “That may be effective, but it is also costly, and raises questions of sustainability.”

Endless military operations can never disrupt AL Qaeda‘s attacks completely, though, said Jones, because the group could always switch to the ISIS attack model — remotely cultivating homegrown extremists who never set foot outside the West, let alone make the arduous journey to a training site in the Afghan mountains. That approach has allowed ISIS to claim credit for local extremists’ shootings, bombings, stabbings, and truck attacks from the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom and France.

“Many attackers today don’t need overseas training anyway,” Jones said. “They may not have really needed it in the past either, but attacks like Manchester and Nice show that they certainly don’t now.”

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