Watch Floor Brief · Afghanistan
Most Americans remember August 15, 2021, as an ending: Kabul fell, the Afghan government collapsed, the evacuation began, and America’s twenty-year war was over. Five years later, I increasingly think we should also understand it as the beginning of another cycle.
Five years ago.
When the Taliban returned to Kabul, terrorist organizations watching from Afghanistan and beyond did not see only the end of a U.S. war. They watched another superpower leave Afghanistan, another government backed by that superpower collapse, and the Taliban return to power. Another generation of jihadists was handed a powerful victory story.
That matters because we have seen what this story can do before.
We have seen this cycle before.
When the Soviet Union withdrew its final forces from Afghanistan in February 1989, the jihadists who fought them believed they had defeated a superpower. One of the lessons they carried forward was simple: you do not necessarily have to defeat a superpower militarily. You have to outlast it.
Afghanistan then descended into civil war. The Taliban eventually took Kabul in 1996, and al-Qaeda found sanctuary under Taliban rule. But Afghanistan before September 11 was never only the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It became an ecosystem. Fighters from Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere trained, met facilitators, built relationships, and moved money, weapons, ideas, and experience through the same environment.
We had pieces of the picture before 9/11.
September 11 did not come from nowhere. U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had been bombed in 1998. The USS Cole was attacked in 2000. Intelligence officers were tracking Usama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. There were warnings and fragments of intelligence. The problem was understanding what those pieces meant together before the threat reached the United States.
Afghanistan felt far away. Then, on September 11, it was not.
Another generation got its victory.
The Soviet withdrawal became part of the mythology that helped shape al-Qaeda. The American withdrawal has now given another generation its own version of that story. Twice in a generation, terrorist networks have watched a superpower leave Afghanistan and interpreted endurance as proof that jihad works.
That difference in time horizon matters. We think in administrations, election cycles, deployments, budgets, and anniversaries. These networks often think in generations. Five years can feel like distance to us. For an organization rebuilding relationships, training people, and developing capability, it is simply five years to work.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda are more than “historic ties.”
Public discussion still often describes the Taliban and al-Qaeda as having historic ties. That description is too weak. Decades of fighting, sanctuary, and intermarriage have created relationships that survived leadership changes and twenty years of American military pressure. In some cases, those relationships now cross family trees.
The Haqqani Network is central to understanding that continuity. Jalaluddin Haqqani built relationships with Arab jihadists during the anti-Soviet war. His network later became one of the Taliban’s most powerful military components. Today, Sirajuddin Haqqani is one of the most powerful figures in the Taliban government. The idea that the Taliban and al-Qaeda can be understood as two cleanly separated organizations misses how deep those personal and family relationships have become.
The terrorist ecosystem has rebuilt.
The question is no longer whether terrorist organizations returned to Afghanistan. They did. Al-Qaeda is there. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan is there. Islamic State-Khorasan Province is there. Central Asian jihadist organizations and Uyghur militant networks are there. More than twenty terrorist organizations are operating inside Afghanistan.
But counting organizations still misses the larger problem. The networks are interconnected through camps, commanders, facilitators, finance, weapons, logistics, training, and personal relationships. Not everyone who trains in Afghanistan stays there. When people leave, they take knowledge, experience, and connections with them.
The operating model has evolved.
These organizations remain distinct. They have different leaders, structures, goals, rivalries, and, in some cases, direct conflict with one another. None of that prevents cooperation when interests align. The reporting underlying this brief indicates mechanisms through which jihadist organizations can coordinate people, resources, expertise, money, logistics, and capability around shared objectives.
That does not mean every group has merged into one organization. It means the network itself becomes part of the capability. One organization can provide planners, another personnel, another money, another documents or a safe house. They do not have to share a flag to share an operation.
This is not 2001.
That is precisely the point. The terrorists operating today are not starting where they were twenty-five years ago. They spent those years fighting, learning, and adapting. They studied U.S. intelligence collection, military targeting, airport security, border controls, surveillance, law enforcement, and communications monitoring. At the same time, commercial drones, encrypted communications, social media, online finance, and cheap technical tools transformed what small networks can do.
Afghanistan today is not an exact recreation of September 10, 2001. Many of the conditions that existed before September 11 are appearing again, but the people exploiting those conditions have had twenty-five years to improve.
The intelligence problem.
One of the most dangerous changes is how comfortable we can become with repeated warnings. Another camp. Another commander. Another foreign terrorist organization. Another assessment. After a while, information that should cause us to connect the pieces becomes background noise.
Our visibility into Afghanistan is also worse than it was during the war. The United States removed its military presence, lost intelligence infrastructure, and severed many relationships with former Afghan partners. Reduced visibility cannot be confused with reduced threat.
There is another structural problem: intelligence has to be organized into boxes. Al-Qaeda. TTP. ISKP. Taliban. Countries. Regions. Missions. But the threat does not always stay in the box. One report may involve al-Qaeda money, another a TTP facilitator, another an ISKP operative, and another a Taliban relationship. Viewed separately, each can look incomplete. Viewed together, they may describe one network.
Five years later.
For Americans, five years can feel like distance. Afghanistan is no longer on the front page every day. Other wars started. Governments changed. The world moved on. Inside Afghanistan, those same five years offered time to rebuild relationships, recruit, train, move money and weapons, establish camps, develop capabilities, and adapt to the environment we left behind.
The lesson we should have learned.
None of this means the United States had to remain at war in Afghanistan forever. The lesson is different: ending a war does not automatically end the threat that caused us to go there. Distance does not make a threat disappear. A terrorist organization does not need territory inside the United States to threaten Americans. It needs sanctuary somewhere else, networks connecting that sanctuary to the outside world, and enough time for capability and intent to come together.
Five years ago, Kabul fell. For us, it marked the end of twenty years of war. For the terrorist organizations that survived, it gave them something else: time. Afghanistan feels far away again. It is not.