The Afghan Terrorist Threat: ‘Déjà Vu All Over Again?’

WASHINGTON, DC, Sep 13 — If Joe Biden thinks he put an end to the 20-year war in Afghanistan when he led an ill-advised, hasty surrender, he has another thing coming. It “ain’t over yet.” The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist activity, reported on Saturday that the Wolves of Manhattan, a magazine that encourages anti-U.S. terrorism, is calling for new 9/11 style attacks using aircraft on American targets.

Newsweek reports that a principal at SITE, director Rita Katz, used Twitter on Saturday to warn of the pro-Al Qaeda magazine’s call for renewed airborne terrorist attacks in the U.S. She wrote: the edition of the “pro-AQ magazine released today [September 11] incites more attacks with aircraft.” Katz added, “As the AQ [Al-Qaeda] community continues to flood channels…their incitements remind one that AQ remains intent as ever to harm America.”

Last month Chris Costa, senior counterterrorism director under President Donald Trump, told the Associated Press: “This [the withdrawal] is a galvanizing event for jihadists everywhere.” And in an interview with Sharyl Attkisson on Sunday, Mr. Trump called it “the most embarrassing event in the history of our country. We ran from guys with knives. Good fighters, but guys with knives, we ran. We had the F-35s and the F-18s and they had knives, and it made our military look so bad, and it was decision making at the top and with some of our television generals.”

It’s not unusual to forget things as we age, like forgetting where you left your glasses. But to forget that the war in Afghanistan was triggered by a devastating terrorist attack on 9/11 shows that President Biden has forgotten that terrorism is the way the enemy likes to fight and that they will now revert to guerrilla warfare.

Leon Panetta, a former CIA Director and a member of Biden’s Democratic Party, says the Taliban that now has control in Afghanistan is the same Taliban that controlled the country that supported Osama bin Laden and his band of Al-Qaeda terrorists and that aided and abetted their 9/11 attacks. In an interview with veteran reporter Greta Van Susteren on her syndicated TV show, “Full Court Press,” he warned that the Taliban continues to support Al-Qaeda and that he believes they will be planning new U.S attacks.

Panetta said, “We were successful at making sure that the United States did not suffer another 9/11 attack. We were able to go after bin Laden and get someone who was in charge of the attack on our country and send a message to the world that nobody attacks us and gets away with it.” It begs the question: did the Biden withdrawal belie that message?

Terrorism expert Ali Soufan, CEO of The Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy, says our surrender did, indeed, give lie to Panetta’s “message.” The Washington Post published a Labor Day Op-Ed piece by Soufan in which he said, “… the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 sent the opposite message … the terrorism era is far from over. A new, riskier phase has begun.”

Soufan noted that his organization was monitoring social media soon after the U.S. withdrawal and found that terrorists were being urged to set up shop in Afghanistan.

“Large swaths of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq are all, to a greater or lesser extent, ruled by non-state militias, creating an arc of instability from North Africa to South Asia. These groups work with different agendas (many, though not all, take direction from Iran’s Quds Force), but they share one thing in common: virulent anti-Americanism,” according to Soufan.

In fact, news reports tell us that 8,000 to 10,000 jihadists have entered Afghanistan since the Biden retreat and that when the Taliban seized the Bagram airbase last week, they freed 5,000 terrorist prisoners that had been held by the U.S.

On August 16, before the U.S. withdrawal began, Politico was reporting that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress the terrorist networks in Afghanistan “could gain power faster than expected.” The day before, on August 15, MarketWatch reported that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on a call with senators, warned them that the U.S. could be the target of attacks by terrorists based in a Taliban-run Afghanistan. Yet President Biden was saying that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

We lost more than the war in Afghanistan; we lost the ability to effectively monitor terrorist threats. Over the past 20 years, the combined intelligence resources of Afghan and U.S. operatives provided us with advance knowledge on terrorist intentions; the spies we counted on to give us warning of attacks are gone now. And the intelligence operatives who are watching strategically from afar are limited.

The MarketWatch report says that Marc Polymeropoulos, who held several roles related to Afghanistan during a 26-year career in the CIA, the withdrawal “certainly affects our intelligence gathering footprint.”

Our enemies around the world used the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to gloat about America’s surrender in Afghanistan. The Iranian newspaper Vatan-e Emruz ran a story headlined “9/11: The beginning of America’s end. The Chinese Communist Party paper the Global Times marked the occasion by predicting more deadly attacks in the U.S.

Meanwhile, America’s progressive socialists seem to think, and say, not to worry, the 9/11 and the terror attacks over the ensuing years were no big deal. Starting with President Biden, himself, who said the worst violent event — worse than those deadly random acts of mass murder on post-9/11 America was the brou-ha-ha on January 6. He made that absurd observation during his first address in front of a joint session of Congress in April.

And then there was the shameful remark made by Pam Keith, a Democrat contender who lost an election to Rep. Brian Mast [R-FL] in 2020. As mourners gathered to honor the lives of the thousands of dead in New York City, Shanksville, PA, and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, Keith took to Twitter with the message: “People in the Twin Towers on 9/11 had to make the decision to either die in a burning building or jump to their death. How many people had to make that decision on January 6th?”