Afghanistan is going to be a problem for awhile
''The next Afghan civil war just started
With help from Tyler Weyant
AFTER THE KABUL ATTACK — When Bruce Hoffman heard about the attack on Kabul’s airport this morning, he pretty quickly saw the ISIS-K coordinated suicide bombings for what it was: the clearest sign yet that even after the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan, the Taliban faces major threats to its grip on power in the country.
“The Taliban is overwhelmed,” said Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations who has spent four decades studying terrorist groups. “They are very effective at bullying and victimizing civilians, but they are incompetent at battling groups that look like themselves.”
The Taliban overwhelmed Afghan military forces and captured Kabul with shocking speed. But now the Taliban must figure out how to dispatch rival terror groups like the Islamic State Khorasan that have rushed into Afghanistan’s power vacuum. . . .
“You have the beginnings of a massive relocation of radical Islamists to Afghanistan,” Jason Blazakis, a former State Department official and terrorism expert at The Soufan Center, a nonprofit focused on global security, told Nightly.
This is not entirely new, of course. About 18 of the 72 State Department designated terrorist groups operate out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Blazakis said. . . . ''
POLITICO Nightly, 8-26-2021
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