Al Qaeda Expands Its Footprint in Afghanistan

Al Qaeda has set up nine new terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2024, a sign of the Taliban’s increasing tolerance of terror groups in their backyard in spite of pledges to crack down, according to an Afghan resistance leader visiting Washington this week. 

“These are training centers; these are recruitment centers,” said Ali Maisam Nazary, the top diplomat for Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front (NRF) based in the country’s Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. “The Taliban have even allowed al Qaeda to build bases and munitions depots in the heart of the Panjshir Valley. [That’s] something unheard of, something impossible even in the 1990s for al Qaeda to have achieved.” 

Nazary said that since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021, just before the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, terror groups including al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have exploded in size and scope, as the country’s unguarded borders have allowed foreign fighters from Arab countries, Central Asian neighbors, and Europe to pour into Afghanistan. Nazary said that 21 known terror groups are currently operating inside the country.

“We’re seeing all the lights are blinking red,” said Doug Livermore, a former U.S. Navy official and a member of the Special Operations Association of America. The United Nations believes that al Qaeda has training camps in at least 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, even as the Taliban publicly deny that the terror group has a presence in the country. 

The movement of al Qaeda forces into the Panjshir Valley—long a stronghold of the NRF—has been a shock to the resistance, which still controls about 60 percent of the area to the Taliban’s 40 percent, according to Nazary.

Al Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel has explicitly called for foreign fighters to migrate to Afghanistan and prepare to attack the West. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a U.S. government watchdog group, said in a July report that though the Taliban have targeted the Islamic State and some other groups, the fundamentalist organization has tolerated the presence of al Qaeda and TTP. 

Terror groups control much—if not all—of Afghanistan’s border, Nazary said. “Al Qaeda didn’t have any presence in northern Afghanistan in 2001,” he said. “Today, al Qaeda has a presence throughout the country, and the other terrorist forces.” The country has become an “open black market” of leftover weapons, many of them American, he added. 

“The Taliban is having the same problem that we did for 20 years,” Livermore said. “You can control the core, you can control the ring road—to an extent. But then once you start looking out from there, particularly in the east and some of that rough terrain, that seems to be where they [the Islamic State] have managed to establish a pretty solid base of operations.” 

Nazary described the relationship between the Taliban and terror groups as “ironclad,” suggesting the group had even provided passports to allow foreign terrorist fighters into the country. The same U.N. report in July said that the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch has facilitators in both Afghanistan and Turkey who can move terrorist fighters into Europe to conduct attacks. 

But some experts are doubtful that the NRF’s message will resonate in Washington. “They are refusing to acknowledge that it’s not 2001 anymore,” said Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “They don’t recognize that, quite frankly, the U.S. and other Western capitals are not interested in getting dragged into a conflict in Afghanistan. There’s no interest in providing arms or money to anti-Taliban groups.”

U.S. intelligence officials are skeptical—at least publicly—about the extent to which Afghanistan could become a terrorist launching pad. The CIA remains in contact with the Taliban in an effort to stanch terror activities, the agency’s deputy director, David Cohen, said at a conference in Maryland on Wednesday, and he said that U.S. intelligence was able to tip Austrian authorities to an Islamic State threat against a planned Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month. 

“We have been engaging with them, all throughout this period, in various ways, as they have taken on the effort to combat both al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” Cohen said of the U.S. contact with the Taliban, using a common acronym for the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch. “And so this isn’t a ‘mission accomplished’ sort of thing. But it is worth noting that in Afghanistan today, the dire predictions have not come to pass.”

Kugelman said the NRF is trying to leverage growing U.S. concerns about terrorism risks stemming from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s harsh crackdown on women’s rights and perceived political opponents. But, he said, it doesn’t have the power to challenge the Taliban head-on.

“I do think that the NRF might perhaps overstate the dangers in Afghanistan, particularly when it comes to terrorism risks, in order to make a stronger case for support,” he said. “I’d also argue that at the end of the day, the Taliban really does not face any threat at all to its political survival.”