“I just do not see how the IC works in a place like Afghanistan without the US military side by side,” he said. Polymeropoulos said in an email, referring to the intelligence community, including the CIA, “This is just too dangerous.”
The Afghan security forces are facing discouraging challenges. In recent years, they have lost territory due to repeated attacks by the Taliban and relied on the US Air Force to repel the insurgents.
With the waning credibility of the Afghan government, militias – once the main powers that be during the days of the Afghan Civil War in the 1990s – have resurfaced and reappeared, even challenging Afghan security forces in some areas.
“If the president authorizes it, we will still be able to provide some military support to the Afghan national security forces after we leave the country,” said William H. McRaven, the retired naval admiral who led the raid on Osama bin Loading killed it. , said in an interview on Wednesday.
For the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, an important issue now is how readily terrorist operations can be carried out from outside Afghanistan. The history of such operations has a definite mixed record. Attacks by cruise missiles launched from distant ships against terrorist targets in Afghanistan have had low success.
The United States holds a number of air bases in the Persian Gulf region, as well as in Jordan, and the Pentagon operates a large local air headquarters in Qatar. But the further the special operational forces have to travel to reach a target, the more likely the operations will fail, either by missing their tracks, or resulting in a catastrophic failure that could kill U.S. servicemen or civilians on the ground, according to officials. who studied the record.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, who met with allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels on Wednesday, mentioned the military’s ability to achieve terrorist targets in far-flung places “in Africa and other places” where few, if any. any, troops are stationed, apparently referring to drone strikes and commando attacks in Somalia, Yemen and Libya in recent years.