This CIA mission will persist for years

WASHINGTON» As the Afghanistan War wound down, the CIA had expected to shift its primary focus gradually 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 such as China and Russia.

But a pair of a deadly explosion Thursday 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 was evidence that terrorist groups are already working to sow further chaos in the country and could hope to use it as a base for attacks outside Afghanistan.

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 Sept. 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 alqaeda also may try to return to the country. And while the Taliban may 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.”

President Joe Biden’s determination to end the military’s involvement in Afghanistan means that, starting next month, any U.S. presence in the country would most likely be part of a clandestine operation that is not publicly acknowledged.

The CIA’S new mission will be narrower, a senior intelligence official said. It will no longer 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 most 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 unmatched ability to play both sides of a fight frustrated generations of U.S. leaders. The agency expects its mission ahead in Afghanistan will be “more focused” on tracking the development of terrorist groups determined to attack the United States, the senior U.S. intelligence official said.

The U.S. covert operation in Afghanistan could be carried out by 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.

But the narrower mission poses its own tests, including recovering from the damage to the CIA’S source networks caused by the abrupt exit from Afghanistan.

Rebuilding the United States’ information collection will depend in part on electronic eavesdropping and in part on building new networks of human sources, this time from afar, according to former government officials. U.S. officials predicted that Afghan opponents of the Taliban most likely will emerge who will want to help and provide information to the United States.

And without a large U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, any drone strike against an Islamic State or al-qaeda target there will have to depart, for now, from the Persian Gulf. Such long flights reduce the amount of time the planes have to hunt targets, increasing the risk of errors and missed targets. Or they could require a large, and expensive, fleet of drones to be used.