CIA’s Afghanistan mission could last years
WASHINGTON — As the Afghanistan War wound down, the CIA had expected to gradually shift its primary focus away from counterterrorism — a mission that transformed the agency over two decades into a paramilitary organization focused on manhunts and killing — toward traditional spycraft against powers like China and Russia.
But Thursday’s suicide bombing was the latest in a series of rapidly unfolding events since the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover of the country that have upended that plan. Like a black hole with its own gravitational pull, Afghanistan could draw the CIA back into a complex counterterrorism mission for years to come.
U.S. officials are reworking plans to counter threats that could emerge from Afghanistan’s chaos, according to current and former officials: negotiating for new bases in Central Asian countries; determining how clandestine officers can run sources in the country without the military and diplomatic outposts that provided cover to spies for two decades; and figuring out from where the CIA could launch drone strikes and other Afghanistan operations.
Thursday’s attack at the Kabul airport, which killed more than a dozen U.S. service members and scores of Afghan civilians, was evidence that terrorist groups already are working to sow further chaos in the country and could hope to use it as a base for attacks outside Afghanistan.
Hours later, President Joe Biden pledged to hunt down those responsible for the bombings.
“We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and at the moment of our choosing,” he said.
The United States and its allies want to keep Afghanistan from devolving into a terrorist haven akin to Syria a decade ago and Afghanistan before 9-11, when the chaos of war lured a hodgepodge of terrorists and new extremist groups were born.
The most urgent threat in Afghanistan is the local Islamic State group, U.S. officials said. Leaders of al-Qaida also could try to return to the country. And while the Taliban might not want either group in Afghanistan, they may be incapable of keeping them out, current and former U.S. officials said.
“It’s going to get a lot harder,” said Don Hepburn, a former senior CIA officer who served in Afghanistan. “The agency is being drawn in many, many directions.”
Biden’s determination to end the military’s involvement in Afghanistan means that, starting next month, any U.S. presence in the country likely would be part of a clandestine operation that’s not publicly acknowledged.
The CIA’s new mission will be narrower, a senior intelligence official said. It no longer will have to help protect thousands of troops and diplomats and will focus instead on hunting terrorist groups that can attack beyond Afghanistan’s borders. But the rapid U.S. exit devastated the agency’s networks, and spies likely will have to rebuild them and manage sources from abroad, according to current and former officials.
The United States also will have to deal with troublesome partners such as Pakistan, whose tendency to play both sides of the fight frustrated generations of U.S. leaders.
CIA Director William Burns has said that the agency is ready to collect intelligence and conduct operations from afar, or “over the horizon,” but he told lawmakers in the spring that operatives’ ability to gather intelligence and act on threats will erode.
“That’s simply a fact,” said Burns, who went to Kabul this week for secret talks with the Taliban.
Even so, the agency wasn’t starting from scratch. It long had predicted the collapse of the Afghan government and a Taliban victory, and since at least July had warned that they could come soon.
The U.S. covert operation could be carried out by either CIA operatives or Special Operations military troops acting under “Title 50” authority — similar to when Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on a mission run by the spy agency. Such episodes of putting the military under CIA authority became more common in the post-9/11 era as the lines blurred between soldiers and spies.