February 4, 2026

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Is Afghanistan a Strategic Blind Spot for the West?

AP Photo/Nava Jamshidi

Since the disastrous U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 and the ensuing Taliban takeover of the country, Afghanistan has remained a strategic blind spot for Washington and for the West more broadly. Without a presence on the ground in Afghanistan, the terrorism threat landscape remains unclear, contested, and mostly a conversation between a select handful of intelligence officials, policymakers, and counterterrorism analysts. A report released in December by the United Nations Monitoring Team offered new insights into some of the dynamics at play, including the Taliban continuing to consolidate power and control throughout most parts of Afghanistan. By most accounts, the Taliban, as a counterterrorism force, has done an admirable job of containing the spread of Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) throughout greater swaths of the country, mostly keeping the group contained to northern and eastern Afghanistan, where militants operate in small cells. There is some debate among scholars and analysts about whether ISK’s inability to gain more traction within Afghanistan and throughout South Asia more broadly has led the group to concentrate its resources and bandwidth on conducting external attacks, as the group has done in Russia, Iran, Türkiye, and Pakistan. ISK plots have been thwarted in Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere.

In 2025, United States Africa Command (USAFRICOM) launched approximately 124 airstrikes against targets in Somalia, including both Islamic State Somalia and al-Shabaab fighters, materiel, and infrastructure. In January 2026 alone, the U.S. conducted more than two dozen strikes in Somalia. And with strikes in Iran last summer and a Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro this January, it is clear that President Trump does not hesitate to move against a gathering threat. Yet, the U.S. remains largely unengaged in Afghanistan, even as reports about terrorist groups operating openly from that country continue to filter out. Even when the United States maintained a robust military presence in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was still able to amass a formidable fighting force. In October 2015, U.S. forces conducted a multi-day operation in southern Afghanistan that saw 200 SOF personnel and a combined arms assault to attack a training area that stretched for more than thirty miles. Approximately 160 al-Qaeda militants were killed in that operation in the Shorabak district of Kandahar province.

With no U.S. presence in Afghanistan today, there are limited opportunities for intelligence collection, especially human intelligence (HUMINT). As such, it is difficult to know to what extent terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are metastasizing in Afghanistan, or, whether the group remains limited in size and capabilities. Estimates suggest a wide range in the number of al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, from several dozen to several hundred. There are also disagreements about the group’s infrastructure in Afghanistan. According to reporting from the Long War Journal, al-Qaeda operates training camps in twelve separate Afghan provinces, including Kandahar and Takhar. There are also camps believed to be operating in Badghis, Helmand, Ghazni, Kunar, Laghman, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Parwan, Uruzgan, and Zabul. Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) also operates from Afghanistan, as does the Haqqani Network and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP now enjoys Afghan sanctuary provided by the Afghan Taliban, and uses it to launch attacks against Pakistani security forces across the border. That dynamic has led to direct clashes between Kabul and Islamabad.

Despite ruling the country for nearly five years, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has only been formally recognized as a nation-state by the Russian Federation. Many other states engage with the Taliban short of granting formal recognition. Indeed, according to data collected by terrorism expert Aaron Zelin, the Taliban has engaged in thousands of diplomatic meetings with over one hundred separate countries. At the top of this list are China, Iran, Türkiye, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Russia, and others. But Afghanistan still remains in something of a limbo, with the Taliban formally governing a country that continues to exist on the margins of the international system, introducing complications of its own. Afghanistan still faces a range of significant challenges to ensure stability, including in its economy, infrastructure, judicial system, and preparations for the devastating effects of climate change, which are already occurring. And the Taliban's treatment of women and girls continues to be deplorable. Two top Taliban officials, Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants issued against them for the crime of gender persecution.

There are still concerns within the counterterrorism community that Afghanistan could once again emerge as a destination for foreign fighters. The Taliban does not deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the group’s ongoing relationship with al-Qaeda, and it strains credulity when the Taliban claims that there is no al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. After all, in 2024, al-Qaeda’s de facto leader, Saif al-Adel, implored al-Qaeda supporters to travel to Afghanistan to join the group. Al-Qaeda has long played the role of force multiplier and, even in a diminished state, could effectively augment terrorist groups and other violent extremists operating throughout South Asia, including with tacit knowledge transfer, training, and in an advisory capacity on how to sustain a low-level insurgency. If al-Qaeda has remained quiet, is that a deliberate choice or a condition imposed by the Taliban? And if that power dynamic shifts, when and how will the West learn about it? These are just a few of the questions policymakers should consider as the United States and its allies survey the terrorism threat landscape, looking for potential vulnerabilities.

There is no shortage of foreign policy challenges for the Trump administration—Venezuela, Gaza, Ukraine—yet keeping tabs on developments in Afghanistan should not be a task merely relegated to the intelligence community. As the United States learned so painfully on September 11, 2001, a landlocked country in South-Central Asia is still geopolitically important, especially when it harbors transnational terrorist groups that have pledged to relentlessly attack Washington and its allies. Jihadist groups are comfortable playing the ‘long game,’ and even benefit from the lack of policymakers’ bandwidth in engaging with Afghanistan. Far too often, U.S. national security policy is reactive rather than forward-looking. The word "Afghanistan" did not even appear once in the Trump administration’s national security strategy, while the word ‘terrorism’ was mentioned five times, with several of those mentions related to so-called ‘narco-terrorists.’