Al-Qaeda numbers in Afghanistan up ‘slightly’, says US commander

The al-Qaeda extremist group has grown slightly inside Afghanistan since US forces left in late August, and the country’s new Taliban leaders are divided over whether to fulfill their 2020 pledge to break ties with the group, the top US commander in the region said Thursday.

Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the departure of US military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan has made it much harder to track al-Qaeda and other extremist groups inside Afghanistan.

“We’re probably at about 1 or 2% of the capabilities we once had to look into Afghanistan,” he said, adding that this makes it “very hard, not impossible” to ensure that neither al-Qaeda nor the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate can pose a threat to the United States.

Speaking at the Pentagon, McKenzie said it’s clear that al-Qaeda is attempting to rebuild its presence inside Afghanistan, which was the base from which it planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. He said some militants are coming into the country through its porous borders, but it is hard for the US to track numbers.

The US invasion that followed the Sept 11 attacks led to a 20-year war that succeeded initially by removing the Taliban from power but ultimately failed. After President Joe Biden announced in April that he was withdrawing completely from Afghanistan, the Taliban systematically overpowered Afghan government defenses and seized Kabul, the capital, in August.

McKenzie and other senior US military and national security officials had said before the US withdrawal that it would complicate efforts to keep a lid on the al-Qaeda threat, in part because of the loss of on-the-ground intelligence information and the absence of a US-friendly government in Kabul. The US says it will rely on airstrikes from drones and other aircraft based beyond Afghanistan’s borders to respond to any extremist threats against the US homeland.