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US says al-Qaeda ‘hasn’t regrouped’

Report claims few members remain

WASHINGTON: US spy agencies have concluded in a new intelligence assessment that al-Qaeda has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan since the US withdrawal last August and that only a handful of longtime al-Qaeda members remain in the country.

The terror group does not have the ability to launch attacks from the country against the United States, the assessment said. Instead, it said, al-Qaeda will rely on, at least for now, an array of loyal affiliates outside the region to carry out potential terrorist plots against the West.

But several counterterrorism analysts said the spy agencies’ judgments represented an optimistic snapshot of a complex and fast-moving terrorist landscape. The assessment, a declassified summary of which was provided to The New York Times, represents the consensus views of the US intelligence agencies.

“The assessment is substantially accurate, but it’s also the most positive outlook on a threat picture that is still quite fluid,” said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former top UN counterterrorism official.

The assessment was prepared after Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda’s top leader, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month. The death of al-Zawahri, one of the world’s most-wanted terrorist leaders, after a decades-long search was a major victory for President Joe Biden, but it raised immediate questions about al-Zawahri’s presence in Afghanistan a year after Mr Biden withdrew all US forces, clearing the way for the Taliban to regain control of the country.

Republicans have said that the president’s pullout has endangered the United States. The fact that the al-Qaeda leader felt safe enough to return to the Afghan capital, they argue, was a sign of a failed policy that they predicted would allow the terror group to rebuild training camps and plot attacks despite the Taliban’s pledge to deny it a safe haven. In October, a top Pentagon official said that al-Qaeda could be able to regroup in Afghanistan and attack the United States in one to two years.

Administration officials have pushed back on the most recent criticisms, noting a pledge that Mr Biden made when he announced al-Zawahri’s death.

“As President Biden has said, we will continue to remain vigilant, along with our partners, to defend our nation and ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said in an email on Saturday.

Yet some outside counterterrorism specialists 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 seized power. The report noted that a number of al-Qaeda leaders were possibly living in Kabul and that the uptick in public statements by al-Zawahri suggested that he was able to lead more effectively after the Taliban seized 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 security consulting firm, said of the intelligence analysis. He added that the summary said “little about the longer-term prospects of al-Qaeda.”

Some counterterrorism experts also took issue with the government analysts’ judgment that fewer than a dozen al-Qaeda members with longtime 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.

“Their numbers of active, hard-core al-Qaeda in AfPak make no sense,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan. “At least three dozen senior al-Qaeda commanders were freed from Afghan jails a year ago. I very much doubt they have turned to farming or accounting as their post-prison vocations.”

The intelligence summary also said that members of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Afghanistan, formerly known as al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, or Aqis, were largely inactive and focused mainly on activities like media production.

But a UN report in July estimated that the affiliate had 180 to 400 fighters — “primarily from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan” — who were in several Taliban combat units.

ASIA

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2022-08-15T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-15T07:00:00.0000000Z

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