Among the many bitter ironies of the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, few are as painful as the prospect of a resurgence of al Qaeda and other jihadi groups in the country where so much American blood and treasure was spilled. After 20 years of war that cost more than 6,000 U.S. service members and contractors their lives and the American public $2 trillion, a revival of the organization that triggered it all is difficult to stomach.
That possibility has come as a surprise to many. In the foreign policy establishment, the global “war on terror” ended in 2018, when U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis issued a National Defense Strategy that identified China and Russia, America’s great-power rivals, as the biggest threats to U.S. security. For the broader public, the end came even earlier, when major print and broadcast media outlets reassigned many reporters from the terrorism beat to cover President Donald Trump, his shady relationship with Russia, and the subsequent raft of scandals. Even the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 by a foreign national—a Saudi air force officer who killed three sailors and wounded 13 others in Pensacola, Florida, in 2019—did nothing to distract the public from the Trump imbroglios. The sense that the jihadi violence had receded carried over into the Biden administration, which turned its attention to right-wing white supremacist terror and made little mention of jihadi violence before the nightmare in Kabul.
