Retired Gen. Frank McKenzie believes terror groups in Afghanistan have grown, making the United States less safe now than when it departed the Middle Eastern country exactly a year ago.
McKenzie, who was the commander of U.S. Central Command at the time of the withdrawal last August, told the BBC that al Qaeda and ISIS-K, the Afghanistan affiliate of the Islamic State, are “on a track where they’re going to” be “able to flourish either through complicity of the Taliban or through undergovernance of areas outside of Kabul.”
“I believe we’re on a track where they are going to grow and they’re going to be able to proceed with their aspirations to conduct attacks against the West,” the former commander, who retired this spring, said.
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His comments came exactly a year after the final U.S. soldier left Afghanistan after its 20-year war concluded, which he advised against beforehand, though President Joe Biden opted to end the war anyway. McKenzie initially advised keeping a troop presence at 4,000 and then lowered it to 2,500 when U.S. troop levels dipped below his initial recommendation.
In previous comments, McKenzie preemptively addressed critics who argue against an indefinite troop presence, saying, “I know the criticism: The Taliban are going to come after you, and you’re going to have to beef up your forces. The commander on the ground and I didn’t believe that was necessarily the case. For one thing, at 2,500, we were down to a pretty lean combat capability, not a lot of attack surface there for the Taliban to get at. Two, we would have coupled the 2,500 presence with a strong diplomatic campaign to put pressure on the Taliban.”
He has blamed the demise of the Afghan government and Afghan military — which the U.S. spent trillions of dollars supporting, only for both to collapse during a Taliban military offensive at the beginning of August, only weeks ahead of their withdrawal — on the Trump administration’s decision to sign the Doha agreement.
McKenzie called it a “defeat mechanism” for the military campaign in Afghanistan and said the deal was a “deflating experience” for the Afghan government.
With the withdrawal, the military’s counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan became centered on its over-the-horizon capabilities, which are strikes that the U.S. conducts without being in the country to gather real-time intelligence. The U.S. has conducted one such strike in the year since U.S. troops departed, and it led to the death of Ayman al Zawahiri, the successor of Osama bin Laden in al Qaeda’s leadership.
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“I’ve said publicly in testimony that counterterrorism operations from over the horizon in Afghanistan would be very hard but not impossible,” McKenzie said in the BBC interview. “I’d say a strike in a year probably meets the criteria of very hard but not impossible. There are a lot of other targets there and a lot of other organizations that aspire to do us ill, and we’re going to have to continue to apply pressure, and that’s going to be very difficult.”
