Warnings that Afghanistan would become a launching pad for terrorist attacks around the world after the withdrawal of U.S. troops turned out to be wrong, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said Wednesday.
“The dire predictions have not come to pass,” he said at a national security conference in Rockville, Maryland.
Cohen was referring to warnings from some lawmakers and analysts that President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 has opened the door to a resurgence of terrorist groups in that country.
Republican lawmakers have blasted the Biden administration over its handling of the U.S. exit and argued that Afghanistan is once again a safe haven for terrorist groups, including ISIS-K.
A United Nations report in July said that foreign governments are increasingly concerned about terrorist threats from Afghanistan, including ISIS-K. The report said ISIS-K relies on networks of “facilitators” in Afghanistan and Turkey that are capable of moving operatives from Central Asia and Afghanistan “towards Europe to conduct external operations.”
ISIS-K has bolstered its financial, logistical and recruitment efforts and likely provided fighters, funds and training for large-scale attacks carried out earlier this year in Russia and Iran, according to the U.N. report.
Cohen said that Washington has shifted its national security priorities in recent years to focus on China and Russia, but said that combating terrorism remains a mission at which the country’s intelligence agencies cannot afford to fail.
“We continue to invest in it, we’re continuing to deploy resources,” Cohen said.
He said that the Islamic State terrorist group, including its branch in Afghanistan known as ISIS-K, remains the top terrorist threat.
The terrorist threat landscape is now more diffuse and, in some ways, more complicated than after the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, he said.
But he added that “it’s worthwhile to take stock of some progress” in the U.S. counterterrorism fight.
Cohen cited the U.S. operation that killed Al Qaeda’s chief, Ayman Zawahiri, in a safe house in Kabul in 2022 as an example of a counterterrorism success.
He also said that the CIA has kept in communication with the Taliban, which now rules Afghanistan, reminding the group of its commitment to ensure the country does not again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks abroad.
“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,
“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,” he said.
Vienna plot foiled
Cohen said the CIA and other intelligence agencies played a pivotal role in helping Austrian authorities thwart a potentially lethal plot by operatives linked to ISIS to attack a scheduled Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month.
The suspects “were plotting to kill a huge number of people,” he said.
“The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do,” Cohen said.
As a result, hundreds of lives were saved, he said, an example of what he called the “successes” in counterterrorism efforts that sometimes go overlooked.
“We do occasionally make progress,” Cohen said.
Swift had been scheduled to perform Aug. 8-10 at Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna to an estimated 170,000 fans. But the shows were called off after Austrian police said Aug. 7 that the planned terrorist attack had targeted the concerts.
