Al Qaeda could be rebuilt in the interior of Afghanistan in a year or two, top intelligence officials said on Tuesday, noting that some members of the terrorist group had already returned to the country.
Earlier this year, top Pentagon officials said Al Qaeda could be reconstituted in two years, and then told lawmakers after the fall of the Afghan government that they were reviewing that timeline.
The new timetable is not a drastic change, but reflects the reality that the Taliban have a limited ability to control Afghanistan’s borders. Although the Taliban have long fought with the Islamic State affiliate, they are established allies of Al Qaeda. While the Taliban pledged in the February 2020 peace deal with the United States not to let Afghanistan be used by terrorist groups, analysts have said those promises sound empty.
“The current assessment is probably conservative for one to two years for al-Qaeda to build some capacity to at least threaten its homeland,” Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, director of the Intel Agency, said Tuesday. Defense license, at the Security Summit meeting.
David S. Cohen, deputy director of the CIA, said the hard part of the question about the timetable was knowing when al-Qaeda or the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan “will have the ability to go on the attack. the homeland ”before being detected. .
The CIA is closely monitoring “some possible al-Qaeda movements toward Afghanistan,” Cohen said.
Cohen did not identify specific Qaeda members who have traveled back to Afghanistan since the fall of the U.S.-backed government. But Osama bin Laden’s former security chief, Amin al Haq, who served with Bin Laden during the Battle of Tora Bora, was seen in a video returning to Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province last month.
Speaking at the same conference on Monday, Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said Afghanistan was not the biggest terrorist threat facing the United States. He said Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq posed more substantial threats.
The CIA will have to increase its reliance on collecting intelligence from afar, on so-called horizon operations, Cohen said. He added that the agency hoped to do its job, including rebuilding news networks, closer to Afghanistan. “We will also look for ways to work from the horizon, as far as possible,” he said.
Information gathering in Afghanistan has intensified, General Berrier said, while agencies improve their ability to monitor China and Russia.
“We are thinking of ways to re-access Afghanistan with all sorts of sources,” the general said. But he added: “We need to be careful to balance these scarce resources with this pivot towards China and Russia.”