Is global terror making a comeback?

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History appears to be turning full circle. The new haven of global terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and Isis, has turned out to be the old one — Afghanistan. This had already been observed last summer when a United Nations report found “strong and symbiotic ties” between the Taliban and a rebounding al-Qaeda. It did not get much attention then. It is only now because of last week’s Isis-Khorasan attack on Moscow’s Crocus theatre — which was Russia’s worst terrorist incident in more than two decades, taking more than 140 lives — that we are sitting up and taking notice. The frustrating thing is that Afghanistan’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 Afghanistan. 

The arguments in defence of America’s precipitous exit sounded as bad three years 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 World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s deal with the Taliban was a terrible one. He let out thousands of terrorists from Afghan jails and either cynically or gullibly took the Taliban’s word that they would deny a sanctuary to al-Qaeda. People also argued that the US was needlessly losing lives in Afghanistan 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 building a thriving liberal democracy in Afghanistan. America’s sole purpose was to prevent the return of the Taliban. It was working.

The other two arguments in Biden’s defence were that the Taliban was a reformed and moderated force — the so-called Taliban 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 intelligence for the speed with which the Taliban regained power. Again, this was wrong. The CIA did not forecast to the day — 4pm on August 15 2021 — the Taliban’s return; but they gave it a high probability of happening. As we know, scores of people including 13 US servicemen were killed by a terrorist attack at Kabul airport. It was carried out by Isis-K, which also perpetrated last week’s attack 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 Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army would not have deserted its posts and defected to the Taliban. The picture would look very different 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 Afghanistan — though one is the Taliban’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 Afghan gold mines it partially controls. For a notoriously efficient and patient terrorist group, this is serious cash. Remember it only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to carry out the 9/11 attacks. One piece of good news, the 2022 drone strike that took out Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as head of the group, 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 Taliban’s minister of the interior. The Taliban is not even trying to hide its alliance with al-Qaeda.

None of this means we should necessarily expect a new wave of attacks on the west. But we should certainly be on our guard. This week, France put its security services on high alert ahead of the Paris Olympics, which Emmanuel Macron said would be a target. Germany and Belgium say they have foiled recent Isis-K plots. Most important, 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?

Recommended reading 

• If you want to hear a sophisticated discussion on this subject listen to the Soufan Center’s Colin Clarke in conversation with Foreign Policy’s excellent Ravi Agrawal. They cover a lot of ground.

• My column this week looks at 2024’s potential Ralph Nader election spoiler: Robert F Kennedy Jr, who this week made an obscure pick as his third party running mate — Nicole Shanahan, the wealthy ex-wife of Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin. “RFK Jr’s perilous voyage of discovery”.

• Do also read Gideon’s thoughtful column on global identity geopolitics. He asks why we care so much about Gaza and Ukraine but ignore war with even higher casualty rates in, say, Ethiopia, Sudan, or Nigeria. Black lives matter but apparently African lives do not seem to count for much.  

• Also in the FT do read Margaret Heffernan on why “for young people, the job search has never been so miserable”. This piece opened my eyes to how job search technology is the friend of employers, not prospective employees. “The world’s bedrooms are full of lonely young people wading through websites that promise their efficient algorithmic filtering will take them straight to the dream job. In fact they do no such thing.” As she points out, we’re now used to dismissing the young as slackers and snowflakes. This is grossly unfair. 

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Gideon Rachman responds

Dear Ed,

The west’s current attitude to terrorism, reminds me of a saying that is often attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” (I overuse that quote, even more than you overuse the Hegel quote). After the debacle of the Afghanistan war, everyone in Washington and Europe was desperate to put the “war on terror” behind them. It is now widely thought of as a generation-long strategic error — which led the west to play down other problems (the rise of China, Russian revanchism), while betraying its own values in a losing fight.

But just because we have lost interest in the terrorists, does not mean the terrorists have lost interest in us. There was always a clear risk that Afghanistan would be re-established as a base for terrorism. After the fall of Kabul, there was some hopeful talk that the US would be able to monitor the problem (and strike when necessary) from “over the horizon”. But even the supporters of this idea were crossing their fingers as they said it. 

That said, it is not totally clear to me that the Moscow attack is proof positive that the west is now back in the era when the threat of Islamist terrorism was a daily preoccupation. The US, after all, did warn the Russians that an attack was imminent — which suggests that they have decent intelligence on Isis-K. The Russians clearly have other preoccupations at the moment and are disinclined to listen to Washington — so they could be unusually vulnerable.

I’d also point out that, it is not as if we had the Islamist terror threat completely contained when western forces were still in Afghanistan. The Bataclan attack in Paris took place in 2015. The Manchester arena bombing took place in 2017.

And its also not just the west that has cause to look back ruefully at policy mistakes in Afghanistan. Having cosied up to the Taliban for years, Pakistan is now discovering that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a security threat to their own nation. Earlier this month, the Pakistanis bombed Taliban targets inside Afghanistan.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Does DoJ versus Apple signal a market top?”:
“It all comes down to vertical vs horizontal monopolies, and regulation via function, rather than size per se.

In that regard, I’m for publicly regulating efficient monopolies/national champions in a single industry that result from increasing returns to scale in manufacturing (Boeing) or network effects (search engines).

I’m for breaking up conglomerates like Alphabet and Apple that are holding companies of firms in unrelated industries. These are bad for two reasons — first, backing by the holding company is unfair to independent firms that compete with the conglomerate’s subsidiary, and second, the conglomerates (like WR Grace in the 70s) tend to be run by incompetent finance types who do not understand any industry. No single Amazon executive can understand book sales AND groceries AND movies and television.

As Peter Drucker said, finance professionals think companies make money. But companies don’t make money, they make shoes.” — Marshall Auerback