Robin Wright
Only it didn’t. The mother of all bombs killed fewer than a hundred of the group’s fighters, and had a negligible long-term impact on isis-k. (The “K” stands for Khorasan, the name of an ancient province that once included parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.) isis-k is now arguably the most militant group in Afghanistan. It has also carried out some of the country’s worst recent atrocities. In the first four months of this year, the jihadi extremist movement carried out seventy-seven attacks across Afghanistan, the United Nations reported. In May, a bombing at a girls’ school in Kabul killed ninety people, many of them students, and injured more than two hundred and seventy others. On Thursday, a lone isis-k bomber wearing a suicide vest walked to the perimeter of Kabul’s international airport and blew himself up. Thirteen marines and Navy personnel were killed; at least a hundred and seventy Afghans died. It was one of the deadliest attacks in more than a decade against the United States, the world’s premier military power.
Hours later, President Biden reflected the anger and agony of the nation when he vowed revenge against isis-k. “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: we will not forgive,” he said, in a White House address. “We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” Pressed on Biden’s comment, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said, on Friday, “I think he made clear yesterday that he did not want them to live on the Earth anymore.” On Friday night, Central Command announced that it had conducted a drone strike on an isis-k planner in eastern Nangarhar Province. “Initial indications are that we killed the target,” the statement said. “We know of no civilian casualties.”
The United States may indeed manage to kill more isis-k fighters and destroy some of their modest arsenal. But the central flaw in U.S. strategy is the belief that military force can eradicate extremist groups or radical ideologies. On Friday evening, a senior Biden Administration official acknowledged that the United States “can’t physically eliminate an ideology. What you can do is deal, hopefully effectively, with any threat that it poses.” Past Administrations have tried lethal strikes. In August, 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered Operation Infinite Reach, a series of cruise-missile attacks on Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that U.S. intelligence erroneously linked to Osama bin Laden. The strikes were in retaliation for the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than two hundred and injured more than four thousand. That U.S. operation had limited impact. Three years later, Al Qaeda operatives carried out the 9/11 attacks, killing nearly three thousand in the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Despite the killing of bin Laden, a decade ago, the more skilled Al Qaeda fighters were the force multipliers in the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan this year.
“The bottom line is that kinetic action by itself cannot significantly counter terrorist organizations,” Seth Jones, a former adviser to U.S. Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, told me. “It is very limited in what it can do. It can disrupt operationally and take people out. But tactical and operational impact is very short-term.”
isis-k may pay a physical price for its brazen attack, but it scored political and psychological points among Sunni Muslim extremists and wannabe militants that will make it more popular in the world of jihadism. It could even come out ahead of where it was, experts warn. “Up until recently, before the U.S. withdrawal, isis-k had been relegated to the backwater of isis activity,” Jones, who is now the director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.
isis-k was founded in late 2014 by disaffected members of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and later joined by members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian militants. The United States has long tried to contain isis-k, as have both the (now defunct) Afghan government and the Taliban—it was the lone issue on which the three warring parties agreed. Since 2016, U.S. strikes have killed the movement’s first four emirs. In 2018, at its peak, isis-k was ranked as one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world, and claimed to have up to four thousand fighters, Jones said. It has operated in Kabul and also in Nangarhar, Kunar, Jowzjan, Paktia, Kunduz, and Herat provinces. But, by the end of summer, 2018, it had been pushed out of much of northern Afghanistan. And in 2019, the group was “nearly eradicated” in its eastern strongholds, after a series of offensives by U.S., Afghan, and Taliban forces, the Congressional Research Service reported. At one point, the U.S. effectively provided air support for Taliban operations against isis-k. In November, 2019, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani boasted, using an alternate name for isis, “We have obliterated Daesh.”
Yet, today, Ghani has fled Afghanistan and isis-k has made a comeback. In June, the United Nations reported that isis-k remained “active and dangerous” in Afghanistan and a threat to the wider region. Shahab al-Muhajir, who became its emir last year, was positioning isis-k to be “the sole pure rejectionist group in Afghanistan, to recruit disaffected Taliban and other militants to swell its ranks.” Its core collection of fighters was estimated to be between fifteen hundred and two thousand, the U.N. report stated. On Friday, the Pentagon said that, as the Taliban swept across the country, thousands of isis-k fighters were freed from prisons, notably at Bagram Air Base, where the most hardened operatives were jailed.
With the withdrawal of the United States and all other nato forces, Afghanistan may now become a battlefield between the Taliban and isis-k, experts say. The senior Biden Administration official said that the United States would consider coöperating with the Taliban to contain isis-k. He predicted that isis-k would focus in the near term on regaining ground in Afghanistan rather than attacking U.S. targets. Both movements seek to create a single global Islamic caliphate, but they differ starkly in their tactics. The Taliban consider isis-k to be a terrorist group. Most of the isis-k attacks have been against soft targets, such as schools and mosques, or against rival religious sects, such as Hazara Shiites. It seeks to force allegiance. Its strategy is to recruit disaffected Taliban members and sow sectarian chaos. Rita Katz, of the site Intelligence Group, told me that it wants to counter the widely held notion among Islamists and jihadists “that the Taliban defeated America, instead framing the Taliban as an agent of the Americans and its takeover of Afghanistan as part of an American-made plan.” In a recent issue of Al-Naba, a newspaper released by isis, the group wrote, “What happened is nothing more than replacing a shaven tyrant with a bearded [tyrant].”
The Taliban, with at least seventy thousand fighters, far outnumber isis-k, which is not a formidable ground force, Katz said: “isis will continue to carry out attacks, but it is not a force that can threaten the Taliban in any significant way.” isis-k, in turn, wants to exploit the vulnerability of the new Taliban government—which has yet to form—to become the leading edge of isis worldwide, Jones told me. “There’s essentially anarchy in Afghanistan right now,” he said. “It creates opportunities for groups to take advantage of the political vacuum.” The key will be whether isis-k can recruit new members and transform itself from a terrorist group into an insurgent movement that can control territory and fight it out with the Taliban.
The ability of isis-k to carry out one of the most successful attacks against the American military in years will give it new credibility. The bombing at Kabul airport puts it in a different position than it was even a month ago, Jones noted: “How ironic that the withdrawal of U.S. forces has significantly increased the terrorism challenge—at the very time the U.S. said it had solved the terrorism problem.” And a few missiles or drone strikes, or even another strike by the mother of all bombs, won’t change much anytime soon.
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