Obama administration again underestimates Islamic State as Afghan affiliate grows into threat


Afghan police walk past Islamic State militant flags after an operation in the Kot district of Jalalabad province in Afghanistan on Aug. 1.
(Associated Press)

The Washington Times - Tuesday, August 16, 2016

When reporters asked senior military leaders last summer about the Islamic State franchise in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, the answer was that it was “emergent” — in other words, a fledgling terrorist army.

Last week, the Pentagon issued a statement touting the coalition killing of the Islamic State’s leader in Afghanistan. With it, the military seemed to retroactively increase the threat of the Afghan Islamic State branch a year ago.

“Nangarhar province has been a hotbed for ISIL-Khorasan activity since the summer of 2015,” the press release said.

The description today of the Islamic State as a hotbed of activity a year ago, to one expert, indicates that the Obama administration once again underestimated the Syrian-based group’s ability to expand around the region.

“The tragedy is the same mindset that spins bad news into happy faces — ‘we are winning in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence’ — infects much of official Washington and, by association, many of our allies,” said Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and counterterrorism expert. “That is why ISIS continues to metastasize. Defeating the group’s Salafist ideology and its ever-growing cadre of volunteer jihadi will take decades, many more innocent lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.”

The Islamic State is known by the acronyms ISIL, ISIS and Daesh.

ISIL-Khorasan, or ISIL-K, is the Afghanistan branch that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Iraqi cleric established the terrorist group’s “caliphate” capital in Raqqa, Syria, and brutally invaded Iraq in 2014.

Resolute Support — the NATO-led command in Afghanistan — stands by its assessment, saying “emergent” and “hotbed [of] activity” are both accurate.
“I believe Resolute Support’s estimations of the Daesh presence in Afghanistan have been correct, and both of the statements you cited represent the facts,” said chief spokesman Army Col. Michael T. Lawhorn. “Last summer the Daesh presence in Afghanistan was best described as ‘operationally emergent,’ which reflected that they had a presence here, but hadn’t yet achieved a significant operational capability.”

Col. Lawhorn said the command has seen ISIL-Khorasan expand to eight to 10 districts in Nangarhar, east of Kabul. Combined U.S.-Afghan security forces attacks have reduced its presence to two or three districts and whittled down its terrorist army from 3,000 to 1,200.

ISIL-K also is being attacked by a competitor, the Taliban, the main Islamic extremist army in Afghanistan. The White House gave the OK in January for U.S. forces to directly attack ISIL-K.

“Regardless, they remain dangerous and able to regenerate combat power quickly, so it remains vital that both we and our Afghan partners keep up the pressure to prevent them from becoming a viable regional threat in the future,” Col. Lawhorn said.

‘A significant security problem’

Last month, ISIL-Khorasan struck outside Nangarhar province in the capital of Kabul, sending suicide bombers to the scene of a political protest. Two detonated their explosives, killing at least 80, the deadliest attack in the capital in over a decade.

The Associated Press reported that ISIL-K has moved into a new province, Zabul, southeast of Kabul on the Pakistan border, where it has established a training base for hundreds of recruits.

“They have a lot of money. People here are very poor, and that makes them very easy targets for these foreigners,” Atta Mohammad Haqbayan, director of Zabul’s provincial council, told the AP.

Dakota Wood, a former Marine Corps war planner and a military analyst at The Heritage Foundation, does not take issue with the “emergent” description of a year ago. He said the dwindling number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — now about 9,500 — has made it extremely difficult to collect intelligence and understand what is going on throughout the country.

“A year ago ISIL was fledgling, but since that time has rapidly gained strength,” Mr. Wood said. “The likely reasons are a combination of U.S. withdrawal/reduction in forces in Afghanistan and ineptitude of Afghan security forces. Both would make it easy for ISIL to gain a foothold and expand and not know how rapidly it is occurring nor be able to thwart it.

“Afghanistan will remain a significant security problem for a very long time, a consequence of its political environment, remoteness and austere rugged geography and its regional context created by neighboring countries like Iran and Pakistan,” he added.

At several briefings last summer for reporters, command spokesmen used the word “emergent” but did not use language that indicated that ISIL-K was able to execute a “hotbed [of] activities.”

“We categorize Daesh in Afghanistan as operationally emergent,” a spokesman said in August 2015. “We do not see them as having operational capabilities, so we do not see them having the ability to coordinate operations in more than one part of the country at a time.”

The following month, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook was asked about Islamic State activity in Afghanistan.

“I think we have concerns about a range of groups, not necessarily ISIL specifically, and we’re going to continue to work with our Afghan partners in terms of taking on those groups as they pose a threat to the Afghan government going forward,” Mr. Cook said.

Probe of intelligence reports

The Obama administration has a record of underestimating and downplaying Islamic State’s strength.

After the Islamic State, then commonly referred to an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, invaded Iraq and captured Fallujah in January 2014, President Obama famously referred to the group as the “jayvee” compared to the main al Qaeda group based in Pakistan. That September, he told “60 Minutes” the administration had underestimated the Islamic State, and he blamed the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper.

Last week, a special House Republican task force released a report that said U.S. Central Command — which oversees wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan — in 2014-15 purposely massaged intelligence reports to make the war against the Islamic State in Iraq look better than it actually was.

The probe was prompted by whistleblowing intelligence analysts at CentCom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, complaining up the chain of command. The Defense Department inspector general now is conducting a broad investigation.

“Based on its own investigation, the Joint Task Force has substantiated that structural and management changes made at the CENTCOM Intelligence Directorate starting in mid-2014 resulted in the production and dissemination of intelligence products that were inconsistent with the judgments of many senior, career analysts at CENTCOM,” the House report said.

“There was a consistent trend that across four specific campaigns against ISIL in Iraq throughout 2014 and 2015, assessments approved by the J2 or JIC leadership were consistently more positive than those presented by the IC. Additionally, the selected ISIL weekly and monthly products for CENTCOM senior-leader consumption were generally more positive than similar products not produced for, and unlikely to be seen by, the CENTCOM Commander.”
(J2 is shorthand for a command’s intelligence unit. JIC is the Joint Intelligence Center. IC is the intelligence community.)

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