U.S. government funding the next 9/11

OPINION:

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“We might be done with Afghanistan, but it is not done with us. There is very much a desire to strike the [American] homeland. Not just with ISIS-K but with al Qaeda and the Taliban. This is very much a desire to strike—and strike hard.” Those were the disturbing words spoken by retired United States Army Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann when asked about the consequences of the botched U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021.

Mr. Mann continued with his dark prognostication, “We’re going to see an October 7-style attack” here in the United States,” he explained matter-of-factly. According to the former Green Beret, the attack in question would occur “sometime in 2025, in a very complex level—across all venues—where we live, work, and play.”

Of course, the official U.S. intelligence community threat assessment on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan takes a bizarrely sanguine stance on the topic of the threat posed to the United States. To which Lt. Col. Mann exclaimed, “The current threat assessment is bullsh**t!”

A colorful—though likely apt—description from a Green Beret who spent years, as he put it, hunting this particular jihadist enemy and learning how they think and what their ambitions are. If you understand what Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is and what it represents to the global jihadist movement, you can begin to get a proper understanding of why so many veterans of the War in Afghanistan are disgusted by how the Biden administration pulled out from Afghanistan and why so many of those veterans are concerned about what threats might be emanating from there.

After 20 years of fighting, in part, the Taliban, the Biden administration handed the country back to those Taliban leaders the Americans had worked so hard to keep out of power. It’s no surprise, then, that Afghanistan is rapidly becoming a nexus of global jihadism as it had been in the decade preceding the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The current head of the anti-Taliban resistance, Ahmed Massoud, recently revealed in a conversation with popular podcaster Shawn Ryan that, thanks to the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, the Islamist regime is orchestrating the fusion of itself with al-Qaeda as well as the criminal Haqqani Network. Its leadership is intermarrying with the families of these terrorist organizations to create a super variant of the jihadist scourge that has plagued the West since 9/11.

Compounding these moves has been the evolution of ISIS-K in Afghanistan. While outwardly opposed to the Taliban, ISIS-K appears to be quietly aligned with them, according to Lt. Col. Mann. For all these groups, the overarching issue is their religious ideology. That’s what unites them in their bid to once more strike at the heart of the United States, a country they believe to be the Great Satan.

The story gets stranger (and bleaker), too.

You see, former CIA targeting analyst and counterterrorism expert Sarah Adams has uncovered evidence showing that the United States government has been gifting anywhere between $43 million-$87 million to the Taliban per week, essentially since the shambolic American pullout from Afghanistan. That money, according to the leader of the anti-Taliban resistance, is certainly being used to fund terrorism and prepare for wider strikes against the West.

In a conversation with Shawn Ryan, who is also a former member of the United States Navy SEAL Team 8, the popular podcaster simply stated “I just want the US government to stop funding terrorism.” Mr. Ryan then lamented the fact that he must call for “the United States to stop funding terrorism hits [him] like a ton of bricks.”

Looking back at 9/11, Mr. Ryan pointed out that it took just $500,000 and 19 terrorists to kill 3,000 on that terrible day. Now, imagine what terrorists could do after being lavished with tens of billions of dollars per week and with the Taliban being treated as a legitimate government.

The question becomes, then, how will the next great terrorist attack upon the United States occur? Will it be conducted by members of either al Qaeda in Afghanistan or ISIS-K, who’ve entered the country illegally? While that’s certainly a possibility, Messrs. Ryan and Mann both highlight the fact that, as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Taliban now have the ability to issue passports.

In other words, they’re not here illegally.

Mr. Ryan stated emphatically the terrorists who will conduct the next 9/11 upon the U.S. are “already here.” That they might be here under official Taliban-issued passports or that they are likely well-funded means that whatever they’re planning to do might be more harmful to the United States than even 9/11 had been.

Lt. Col. Mann believes he’s got the solutions to the rising terrorist threat in Afghanistan. He argues that the U.S. government must “immediately open Title 50 to get [the CIA} focused on supporting [Massoud’s anti-Taliban resistance] and to stop all funding to the Taliban.” Mann thinks that the Taliban are “in violation of the Doha Agreement,” and he encourages the U.S. government to meet “any further violations […] with a swift response and [to initiate] surgical strikes” on the Taliban if they continue supporting terrorism.

While everyone is fixated on the domestic politics of our current moment in America, we forget that there’s only one group out there that has killed Americans in consistently gruesome ways and with high body counts. That’s the jihadists who call Taliban-controlled Afghanistan their base of operations. Thanks to the abject ignorance of the U.S. government, Washington has both funded the next 9/11 and has likely set the stage for that next attack to be either as or more devastating than 9/11 had been.

Shawn Ryan is correct: America is asleep, we’ve returned to a pre-9/11 thought process, all the meanwhile the world remains very much in a true clash of civilizations—one in which the jihadists intend to win (and one in which the West cannot afford to lose).

• Brandon J. Weichert is the author of “The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy” (Republic Book Publishers) and is a national security analyst at The National Interest. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.