The chaos left in Afghanistan by the Biden-Harris administration has contributed to increased terrorism threats around the world, including a plot against a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.
Investigators say al-Qaida, the Islamic State (ISIS) and ISIS-K (ISIS-Khorasan, the former name for much of Central Asia, including Iran and Afghanistan) were all involved in radicalizing the teenagers who planned the massacre at the concert.
Al Qaeda is now largely subsumed under the Taliban's Kabul government, and ISIS factions are currently enemies, but the world of terrorism doesn't work like a corporate organizational chart: loyalties and alliances shift, sometimes cooperating and sometimes armed hostility at the same time, and it's constantly shifting.
Afghanistan after the US withdrawal in 2021 will once again provide an ideal environment for international terrorists to become a haven, with sufficient anarchy and the Taliban's lack of central control.
In October 2021, just weeks after the failed U.S. and NATO withdrawal, Biden's top Pentagon officials testified at a congressional hearing that ISIS-K and al-Qaida intended to launch terrorist attacks globally. “The current assessment is that ISIS-K could build up that capability over the course of six to 12 months, and in the case of al-Qaida, it will take one to two years to rebuild that capability,” one official said.
Outside observers witnessed the very same resurgence when America withdrew. As an August 2021 New Yorker headline put it, “Afghanistan Once Again becomes Cradle of Jihadism, Then Al Qaeda.” Ominously, it was ISIS-K that masterminded a brutal attack on our troops at the Abbey Gate of Kabul airport in August 2021 during their evacuation.
Western concert and performance venues have long been favorite targets for terrorists, due to the large crowds they attract and the fact that they often have less secure security than airports and other important locations. Now a terrorist paradigm, ISIS claimed responsibility for simultaneous attacks in 2015 at Paris' Bataclan theater and the Stade de France, the city's main outdoor stadium. More recently, Hamas' savage attack on Israel on October 7 involved an attack on a beach concert, killing some 364 spectators and police officers and taking another 40 hostages.
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ISIS-K is increasingly capable of conducting long-range attacks even in the most hostile counterterrorism environments. For example, in January 2024, ISIS-K attacked a memorial service for the fallen Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani in Kerman, Iran, whom the United States had eliminated four years earlier. Despite extraordinary security measures due to the large number of senior Iranian officials in attendance, and advance warning from the Biden administration, ISIS-K killed 80 attendees. It was a stunning victory in the heart of the world's most dangerous state sponsor of terrorism.
Then in March 2024, ISIS-K struck again, this time on the Crocus Theatre, a concert venue and shopping mall complex in Moscow, killing over 137 people and wounding about 100. Though Vladimir Putin tried to blame Ukraine, the responsibility clearly lay with ISIS-K.
ISIS-K's plans for a Taylor Swift concert underscore the group's growing confidence and geographic reach. How long will it be before ISIS-K-backed attacks reach the United States? The inescapable conclusion is that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan leaves us more vulnerable to external terrorist threats than before.
Too many politicians and commentators have never realized that America’s long-term watch over Afghanistan has prevented terrorists from returning and establishing a base from which to launch widespread attacks. In late 2020, for example, Senator Rand Paul said there was “no significant global terrorist threat coming from Afghanistan,” wrongly concluding that the country could withdraw without risk.
Of course, our very presence is what made us safer, and our withdrawal has made us more vulnerable. In 2020, Paul thought it was “ridiculous” to say it wasn't time to withdraw from Afghanistan. No one should laugh now.
John Bolton served as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019 and as the US ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.
