Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman
WASHINGTON — As the Afghanistan war wound down, the C.I.A. had expected to gradually shift its primary focus away from counterterrorism — a mission that transformed the agency over two decades into a paramilitary organization focused on manhunts and killing — toward traditional spycraft against powers like China and Russia.
But a pair of deadly explosions on Thursday were the latest in a series of rapidly unfolding events since the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover of the country that have upended that plan. Like a black hole with its own gravitational pull, Afghanistan could draw the C.I.A. back into a complex counterterrorism mission for years to come.
American officials are reworking plans to counter threats that could emerge from Afghanistan’s chaos, according to current and former officials: negotiating for new bases in Central Asian countries; determining how clandestine officers can run sources in the country without the military and diplomatic outposts that provided cover to spies for two decades; and figuring out from where the C.I.A. could launch drone strikes and other Afghanistan operations.
Thursday’s attacks at the Kabul airport, which killed more than a dozen U.S. service members and scores of Afghan civilians, were evidence that terrorist groups are already working to sow further chaos in the country and could hope to use it as a base for attacks outside Afghanistan.
The Pentagon said at least 13 U.S. service members were killed and 15 wounded in the attack near an airport gate on Thursday. Scores of Afghan civilians were killed and wounded.CreditCredit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Hours later, President Biden pledged to hunt down those responsible for the bombings. “We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and at the moment of our choosing,” he said.
The United States and its allies want to keep Afghanistan from devolving into a terrorist haven akin to Syria a decade ago and Afghanistan before Sept. 11, when the chaos of war lured a hodgepodge of terrorists and new extremist groups were born. The most urgent threat in Afghanistan is the local Islamic State group, American officials said. Leaders of Al Qaeda may also try to return to the country. And while the Taliban may not want either group in Afghanistan, they may be incapable of keeping them out, current and former American officials said.
“It’s going to get a lot harder,” said Don Hepburn, a former senior C.I.A. officer who served in Afghanistan. “The agency is being drawn in many, many directions.”
Mr. Biden’s determination to end the military’s involvement in Afghanistan means that, starting next month, any American presence in the country would most likely be part of a clandestine operation that is not publicly acknowledged.
The C.I.A.’s new mission will be narrower, a senior intelligence official said. It no will longer have to help protect thousands of troops and diplomats and will focus instead on hunting terrorist groups that can attack beyond Afghanistan’s borders. But the rapid American exit devastated the agency’s networks, and spies will most likely have to rebuild them and manage sources from abroad, according to current and former officials.
The United States will also have to deal with troublesome partners like Pakistan, whose unmatched ability to play both sides of a fight frustrated generations of American leaders.
William J. Burns, the agency’s director, has said that it is ready to collect intelligence and conduct operations from afar, or “over the horizon,” but he told lawmakers in the spring that operatives’ ability to gather intelligence and act on threats will erode. “That’s simply a fact,” said Mr. Burns, who traveled to Kabul this week for secret talks with the Taliban.
Challenges for the C.I.A. lie ahead in Afghanistan, the senior intelligence official acknowledged, while adding that the agency was not starting from scratch. It had long predicted the collapse of the Afghan government and a Taliban victory, and since at least July had warned that they could come sooner than expected.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, C.I.A. officers were the first to meet with Afghan militia fighters. The agency went on to notch successes in Afghanistan, ruthlessly hunting and killing Qaeda operatives, its primary mission in the country after Sept. 11.
It built a vast network of informants who met their agency handlers in Afghanistan, then used the information to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists. The agency prevented Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base to mount a large-scale attack against the United States as it had on Sept. 11.
But that chapter came with a cost in both life and reputation. At least 19 personnel have been killed in Afghanistan — a death toll eclipsed only by the agency’s losses during the Vietnam War. Several agency paramilitary operatives would later die fighting the Islamic State, a sign of how far afield the original mission had strayed. The last C.I.A. operative to die in Afghanistan was a former elite reconnaissance Marine, killed in a firefight in May 2019, a grim bookend to the conflict.
And one of the agency’s clandestine officers was nearly prosecuted for the 2002 torture death of a detainee at a C.I.A. black site known as the Salt Pit. Raids by C.I.A.-trained Afghan units killed a large number of Afghan civilians, increasing Taliban support in parts of the country.
As the conflict dragged on in Afghanistan, veteran agency officers began to see that the war was lost. One of them was Greg Vogle, a former top agency officer who escorted Hamid Karzai into the country in 2001 and twice ran the C.I.A.’s sprawling station in Kabul in subsequent years. Mr. Vogle has told colleagues that the first time he went into Afghanistan, the United States was winning the war. By the second time, it was a tie. By the third time, he said, the United States was losing.
In recent days during the frantic withdrawal, the C.I.A. has been involved in secret rescue missions, according to a senior American official, who declined to detail the efforts.
The agency expects its mission ahead in Afghanistan will be “more focused” on tracking the development of terrorist groups determined to attack the United States, the senior U.S. intelligence official said.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
How did the Taliban gain control? See how the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in a few months, and read about how their strategy enabled them to do so.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
What does their victory mean for terrorist groups? The United States invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to terrorism, and many worry that Al Qaeda and other radical groups will again find safe haven there.
The American covert operation in Afghanistan could be carried out by either C.I.A. operatives or Special Operations military troops acting under “Title 50” authority — similar to when Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on a mission run by the spy agency. Such episodes of putting the military under C.I.A. authority became more common in the post-9/11 era as the lines blurred between soldiers and spies.
But the narrower mission poses its own tests, including recovering from the damage to the C.I.A.’s source networks caused by the abrupt exit from Afghanistan.
Rebuilding America’s information collection will depend in part on electronic eavesdropping and in part on building new networks of human sources, this time from afar, according to former government officials. American officials predicted that Afghan opponents of the Taliban will most likely emerge who will want to help and provide information to the United States.
And without a large American military presence in Afghanistan, any drone strike against an Islamic State or Qaeda target there will have to depart, for now, from the Persian Gulf. Such long flights reduce the amount of time the planes have to hunt targets, increasing the risk of errors and missed targets. Or they could require a large, and expensive, fleet of drones to be used.
The State Department has yet to secure access to bases in Central Asian states that were once part of the Soviet Union, and it is unclear whether that will happen.
Russia has made clear it opposes any American presence in Central Asia. While the former Soviet states sometimes try to balance Moscow’s influence with agreements with the Americans, Russia exerts far more control than it did 20 years ago, when the United States got access to bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan during the early parts of the war in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan garnered little attention during Mr. Burns’s confirmation hearings in February. The bulk of questions from both Democrats and Republicans focused on the Biden administration’s plans to shift intelligence resources to the challenge of China, which Mr. Burns identified as a top priority.
Not long afterward, the White House issued an interim national security strategy that put new emphasis on the need to focus on “great power” competition with Russia and China. Senior American officials said that priority has not changed, and while Afghanistan has a new urgency, American intelligence agencies can handle multiple priorities at once.
But history shows that such multitasking can be difficult, and that there are opportunity costs. When the military and the C.I.A. focused on the war in Iraq, Afghanistan suffered from inattention. A new, more adversarial government in China emerged as the United States obsessed over the return of Russian aggression in Europe and the rise of the Islamic State.
“The front burner is crowded,” said John E. McLaughlin, a former acting director of the C.I.A. “The future holds a mix of challenges. Inevitably, we’re in a world now where China, Russia, countries have that magnitude and influence are going to be in the forefront, but you know lurking in the background, there’s the possibility of terrorists regrouping.”
The potential for Afghanistan to evolve into a hub for terrorist networks also carries its own political risks for the president.
Any terrorist attack originating from Afghanistan would expose Mr. Biden to fierce criticism from his political opponents that it was a result of his decision to pull American troops from the country — yet another factor that is likely to bring intense White House pressure on spy agencies to keep a laser focus on Afghanistan.
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