RAISING OUR GUARD, AGAIN

How vulnerable America and New York City

The Taliban seemed to open the doors to all who wanted to come to Afghanistan to train in the camps. The alliance with the Taliban provided Al Qaeda a sanctuary in which to train and indoctrinate fighters and terrorists, import weapons, forge ties with other jihad groups and leaders, and plot and staff terrorist schemes.”

-National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)

After almost 20 years and less than two weeks before the solemn anniversary of attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the shape of the terrorist threat to the West and New York City has changed — astonishingly for the worse.

The game-changer was the self-inflicted defeat of the United States in Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in recent days. This astounding victory for the Islamist Taliban and the establishment of an Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan coupled with the chaos and humiliation of the U.S. withdrawal is a victory that global jihadists are celebrating worldwide.

Just days ago, Al Qaeda’s “general command” issued a statement congratulating the Taliban on the “great victory,” calling it a “prelude” to Islam’s successes elsewhere and an end to “American-European arrogance” and hegemony. And more importantly, Al Qaeda has called on Muslims worldwide to support the Taliban by emigrating there to provide needed skills and funds to help it build a state.

A few days ago, the U.K.’s former spy chief, Sir John Sawers, who spent five years as the chief of MI6, warned the terror threat is greater today than it was prior to the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and that there was an increased risk of both foreign-based and homegrown attacks since the fall of Afghanistan to Taliban control.

How does the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban change the terror threat, and what does that mean for New York City?

There are those that argue that the Taliban have learned over the past 20 years that it was their permitting Afghanistan to become a safe haven for overseas terrorist plotting in the first place and ultimately Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the United States that lost them their emirate and sent them into exile. Those who support this position posit that the Taliban may be back in power, but it took two decades, and they are not about to risk what they have regained by allowing the building and use of terrorist training camps in-country. They want to cement their control over Afghanistan and hold on to it this time.

However, if past is prologue, upholding this commitment to crack down on Islamist militants will be a major challenge for the Taliban. For starters, according to a June 2021 United Nations report, in the months before American forces withdrew, some 8,000 to 10,000 Taliban-associated jihadi fighters from Central Asia, the North Caucasus region of Russia, Pakistan and the Xinjiang region in western China poured into Afghanistan. Coupled with the latent Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan that even Secretary of State Tony Blinken notes was diminished but never eliminated, the most likely scenario is that Afghanistan once again will become the “Star Wars” Mos Eisley Cantina of the global jihadist universe, where the global network of Islamist movements of all shapes and sizes from North Africa to the Philippines come to meet one another, network, exchange ideas and learn terrorism tradecraft from one another.

Afghanistan is different from Yemen, Iraq, Libya and other ungoverned spaces. It will exert a unique gravitational pull that mobilizes foreign fighters worldwide to come there. After all, only in Afghanistan was the world’s superpower defeated, reenergizing the global jihad. Not surprisingly, in recent days, Al Qaeda sources in Syria note that large numbers among its foreign fighter contingent expressed the desire to travel to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover.

Even if the Taliban forbid the establishment of training camps, they will not refuse providing a “safe haven” for Islamic militants who seek out this Islamist homeland of sorts. Afghanistan will be a crossroads for every militant group/person worldwide and potentially a place where the Taliban may turn a blind eye towards these exchanges of terrorist knowledge and experience. It will be a permissive environment for jihadists.

Former NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen has noted in recent days, “Focusing only on just AQ or ISIS-K is a mistake.” ISIS-K is primarily a localized threat, and Al Qaeda is still a diminished force. “The threat and groups are much more diverse,” he rightly says.

Reprising the role that Afghanistan played in the 1990s at the central node of the global jihad universe, ultimately these Islamist visitors will radiate back out across the globe to their radical clusters radicalized at home and act from there rather than from Afghanistan as Taliban seeks to keep its prints off the deed.

“First will be Western Europe — which will be the test ground …then New York City.” Cohen should know, as he presciently stood up the CIA’s Alec Station in 1996 to focus on Bin Ladin before he was a household name.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s new “over the horizon” counterterrorism strategy, which focuses on using drones and other tools to beat back enemies in far-off lands, is unlikely to be effective. Without eyes and ears on the ground, we will have insufficient intelligence against

this stealthy metastasizing threat. There is no substitute for bases and a robust network of human informants to understand our enemy’s intent and capabilities.

As a result, rather than fighting the terrorists there, we will have to stop them much closer to home.

So what does all this mean to New York City? There was a saying during Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s administration, during which I served, that whenever a terrorist was arrested overseas, they always seemed to have maps or pictures of New York City in their “pocket litter.” Not surprisingly, according to current deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, John Miller, New York City has been the target of 51 terrorist plots since 9/11. No other American city comes anywhere close.

Consequently, if global jihadist networks have a sanctuary in which to regenerate, it means the threat to New York will increase — maybe not tomorrow, but over time.

Defending a city of nearly 9 million is no easy task. New York since 9/11 has been the target of various plots — targeting the subway, synagogues, Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York Stock Exchange, JFK Airport, PATH tunnels, Chelsea and the West Side Highway bike path, to name just a few.

Bloomberg said that New York would always be a target for terrorists, because it was such a wellknown symbol of America. “Terrorists around the world, who feel threatened by the freedoms that we have, always focus on those symbols of freedoms — and that is

New York City,” he said.

Of course, New York is an international symbol of the United States but that is not the only reason is at a higher risk than other American cities. Though it is not America’s political capital, it is the country’s financial capital and striking at America’s economic strength has often been a terrorist goal. Moreover, it is the country’s media and communications capital and to paraphrase the Rand Corporation’s Brian Jenkins, “terrorists want a lot of people watching.” The propaganda benefit from a successful strike that is replayed on televisions and devices worldwide, like 9/11 was, serves as an amazing recruiting tool and frankly strikes fear into a much larger number of people. Lastly, New York’s Jewish population of more than one million, provides yet another attraction to jihadists motivated by a religious-political ideology that hates Jews.

So what are New York City’s chief vulnerabilities and risks? Besides the city’s residents, another million people commute (under normal circumstances) into our metropolis. This provides terrorists with a concentration of people that has the potential to make the impact of an explosion in high-density areas more deadly and more spectacular.

The city also relies on cramped mass public transportation arteries to move around and there is no way to protect every mile of track, nor all the buses or commuter rails that flow into the city. Launching multiple suicide bombers against the NYC subways in 2009 by Al Qaeda’s Najibullah Zazi and his duo of co-conspirators was only one of a number of such plots over the last 20 years.

Recent plot history in New York City as well as from ISIS’s urban terrorist attacks in Europe show that airports also remain a soft and attractive target for terrorists.

Other soft targets at higher levels of risk to terrorist attack include gathering places for crowds — like sporting events. We know that stadiums in (Paris 2015) and (Manchester 2017) have been targeted by suicide bombers. Although Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, the Barclays Center and the Billie Jean King Tennis Center have not been targeted, the NYPD invests significant resources to protect those venues and others.

And then there are the openair crowds that mass in places like Times Square or in Rockefeller Center during Christmas time. Times Square itself was the target of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) in 2010 with a car bomb and urban open-air holiday markets in Europe have seen their share of deadly attacks as well (Berlin 2016).

With all of this in mind, how will the city be defended? First and foremost, New Yorkers are fortunate to have the NYPD and its more than 1,000 personnel devoted to intelligence and counterterrorism duties on a daily basis, 24/7.

Secondly, there is the partnership with federal agencies, most importantly, the FBI through its Joint Terrorism Task Force. In addition, in the years since 9/11, the NYPD has stitched together close working partnerships with local law enforcement agencies that surround the city and federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.

Counterterrorism is a race for information and against time. The terrorist operatives enjoy one key advantage — anonymity. They can plan and plot as long as law enforcement and intelligence do not know who they are or where they are.

Through investigation, intelligence analysis and research, law enforcement’s potential knowledge about the terrorists gradually increases. Unless they act quickly, the terrorists will lose the race.

With the drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan, one of the furthermost barriers of defense of the city has come down. Now, more than ever since 9/11 our safety is in the skilled and able hands of the men and women of the New York City Police Department and FBI.