ISIS in Afghanistan has openly claimed the last attacks that took place at the Kabul airport before American forces evacuated. The deadly suicide bombing last week was followed by several attempts to target the airport with rockets. ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for all of these attacks. While efforts at the airport have now ended, concerns linger about the ability of ISIS to attack Americans elsewhere even after the withdrawal.
ISIS-K responsible for airport attack
The Taliban has waged a twenty year guerilla war to, as they see it, drive out foreign occupiers and overthrow a puppet government. The new regime has made it clear that it has no desire to provoke another American invasion.
ISIS-K, on the other hand, has global ambitions. The group is explicitly motivated by a desire to carry out attention grabbing terrorist attacks aimed against soldiers and civilians alike.
The group has proudly claimed credit for the suicide bombing which killed 13 Americans and at least 169 Afghan civilians at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The rocket attacks that followed, which the group also claimed credit for, were thwarted by U.S. defenses before they could kill anyone else.
The Biden Administration claimed to have eliminated another suicide bomber with a drone strike in Kabul on August 29, preventing what was described as another planned attack on the airport.
Whether or not an ISIS attack was actually prevented is unclear but it is known that the strike demolished a family home, killing a number of young children.
Biden doubles down on drone warfare plans
This is troubling news because the Biden Administration continues to point to these strikes as being the future of American counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.
The White House and the Pentagon are confidently telling the American people that they have the ability to ensure that ISIS-K does not continue to pose a threat even without American troops on the ground in the country.
This already dubious claim is undermined by the fact that there was no physical investigation to confirm that a terrorist attack had been prevented by the drone strike in Kabul.
Without an American presence in the country, the Biden Administration is apparently planning to blow up potential targets in Afghanistan and then tell the American people that the strikes were successful without first bothering to determine what they actually hit.
This policy seems very likely to make American citizens, if anything, less safe. Carelessly striking targets with drones will allow Biden to claim that he is doing something to prevent terrorism while he may in fact be inspiring future attacks.
Following in the footsteps of Obama, Biden is determined to enact a campaign of drone warfare against the group responsible for the airport attacks. This campaign may or may not kill terrorists but it will inevitably kill innocent civilians and further tarnish America’s reputation abroad.
