Al-Qaeda has not regrouped in Afghanistan: US

WASHINGTON • US spy agencies have concluded in a new intelligence assessment that Al-Qaeda has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan since the US withdrawal last August and that only a handful of long-time Al-Qaeda members remain in the country.

The terror group does not have the ability to launch attacks from the country against the United States, the assessment said. Instead, it said, Al-Qaeda will rely on, at least for now, an array of loyal affiliates outside the region to carry out potential terrorist plots against the West.

But several counter-terrorism analysts said the spy agencies' judgments represented an optimistic snapshot of a complex and fast-moving terrorist landscape.

The assessment, a declassified summary of which was provided to The New York Times, represents the consensus views of the US intelligence agencies.

"The assessment is substantially accurate, but it's also the most positive outlook on a threat picture that is still quite fluid," said Mr Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former top United Nations counter-terrorism official.

The assessment was prepared after Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's leader, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month.

The death of al-Zawahiri, who was one of the world's most-wanted terrorist leaders, after a decades-long search was a major victory for US President Joe Biden, but it raised immediate questions about al-Zawahiri's presence in Afghanistan a year after Mr Biden withdrew all US forces, clearing the way for the Taliban to regain control of the country.

Republicans have said that the President's pullout has endangered the US. The fact that the Al-Qaeda leader felt safe enough to return to the Afghan capital, they argue, was a sign of a failed policy that they predicted would allow the terror group to rebuild training camps and plot attacks despite the Taliban's pledge to deny it a safe haven.

Administration officials have pushed back on the most recent criticisms, noting a pledge that Mr Biden made when he announced al-Zawahiri's death.

"As President Biden has said, we will continue to remain vigilant, along with our partners, to defend our nation and ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for terrorism," Ms Adrienne Watson, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said in an e-mail last Saturday.

Yet some outside counter-terrorism specialists saw the new intelligence assessment as overly hopeful. "This seems like an overly rosy assessment to the point of being slightly myopic," Mr Colin P. Clarke, a counter-terrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York, said of the intelligence analysis.

Some counter-terrorism experts also took issue with the government analysts' judgment that fewer than a dozen Al-Qaeda members with long-time ties to the group are in Afghanistan and that most of those members were likely there before the fall of the Afghan government last summer.

"Their numbers of active, hard-core Al-Qaeda in AfPak make no sense," said Mr Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He suggested the timing of the government assessment was "to deflect attention from the disastrous consequences of last year's shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan".

NYTIMES