WASHINGTON — U.S. spy agencies have concluded in a new intelligence assessment that al-Qaida has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal last August and that only a handful of longtime al-Qaida members remain in the country.
The terror group does not have the ability to launch attacks from the country against the United States, the assessment said. Instead, it said, al-Qaida will rely on, at least for now, an array of loyal affiliates outside the region to carry out potential terrorist plots against the West.
But several counterterrorism analysts said the spy agencies’ judgments represented an optimistic snapshot. The assessment, a declassified summary of which was provided to The New York Times, represents the consensus views of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
“The assessment is substantially accurate, but it’s also the most positive outlook on a threat picture that is still quite fluid,” said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former top U.N. counterterrorism official.
The assessment was prepared after Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida’s top leader, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month. The death of al-Zawahri was a major victory for President Joe Biden, but it raised immediate questions about al-Zawahri’s presence in Afghanistan a year after Biden withdrew all U.S. forces, clearing the way for the Taliban to regain control.
Republicans have said that the fact that the al-Qaida leader felt safe enough to return to the Afghan capital was a sign of a failed policy that they predicted would allow the terror group to rebuild training camps and plot attacks despite the Taliban’s pledge to deny it a safe haven.
Administration officials have pushed back on the most recent criticisms, noting a pledge that Biden made when he announced al-Zawahri’s death.
“As President Biden has said, we will continue to remain vigilant, along with our partners, to defend our nation and ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said in an email Saturday.
Yet some outside counterterrorism specialists saw the new intelligence assessment as overly hopeful.
“This seems like an overly rosy assessment to the point of being slightly myopic,” Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York, said of the intelligence analysis.
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