Wednesday 3 November 2021

Will the Taliban join with the US to target Isis in Afghanistan?

Isis-Khorasan (Isis-K), the branch of Islamic State living and fighting in eastern Afghanistan, had a tough time when the Americans were in the country because the US military and CIA and other agencies had built up a huge intelligence-gathering apparatus which was able to eavesdrop on their communications, spot them from satellites, aircraft and drones and help special operations forces to pinpoint and target Isis militants. All that has gone. The US military can still send surveillance drones from Qatar and United Arab Emirates but they only travel at about 500mph, so they take ages to get into position over Afghanistan and then can't stay very long before having to head back to fuel up. So the intelligence picture is minimal. But worse still, there is absolutely no cooperation with the Taliban, so even if a passing drone spotted a gathering of Isis ready to launch an attack somewhere, there would be no one on the ground to call on to mount a counter-terrorist strike and it would take too long to russle up a few fighter bombers to go and bomb them and, anyway, the Biden White House probably wouldn't give permission because Biden wants nothing more to do with forever wars in Afghanistan. So the increasing number of attacks by Isis against the Taliban and civilians is largely because Isis-K knows it can get away with it since they don't have the US breathing down their necks 24 hours a day. I wonder if the Pentagon thought of this scenario when the final US troops were pulled out in August. Whether they did or didn't we now have US officals expressing concern that Isis-K is on the rise and might pose a real threat not only to the survival of Afghanistan but also to the US homeland. Here we go again! You can almost read the script being prepared. The US will have to persuade the Taliban to mount joint attacks to prevent Isis-K from seizing territory in Afghanistan and posing a threat to the world. Well it's not going to happen. Not under Biden. And as for the over-the-horizon counter-terrorist force the Pentagon keeps on talking about - based in the Gulf - I reckon that's going to be very under-used. The Taliban wants to fight Isis on its own but so far it's not coping at all well. What is bizarre is that we are now almost looking on the Taliban as the sort-of good guys taking on an Islamic group even more militant and extreme than they are, on behalf of us all. Very weird.

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