TOI correspondent from Washington: Al-Qaida and terrorist training camps are back in Afghanistan 25 years after 9/11.The terrorist organisation and its affiliates have established at least eight training sites in Afghanistan over the past three years, exploiting the security vacuum created by the Taliban’s return to power and the US withdrawal in 2021, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.UN monitors and Western intelligence officials say the camps are being used for weapons, explosives, guerrilla warfare and increasingly sophisticated instruction involving encryption, drones and artificial intelligence.Core al-Qaida now numbers perhaps 100 fighters and is functioning less as an expeditionary army than as a “consulting service” for other militants. Other terror groups, including an affiliate of the Islamic State, al-Qaida’s main rival, also have set up new training sites, giving “militant Islamist groups” a foothold in at least 14 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, the report said.For New Delhi, the most unsettling part of the Post’s wake-up call on al-Qaida’s revival is not that the terror group is rebuilding training camps; it is that the geography, networks and regional ecosystem surrounding those camps look hauntingly familiar.India endured terrorist violence throughout the 1990s and 2000s while the American public was only beginning to wake up to the transnational jihadist threat, so this is less a new chapter than an old warning with updated technology because the al-Qaida story is deeply intertwined with Pakistan.The 9/11 Commission documented how Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan and was eventually captured in Islamabad in 1995. KSM – a Pakistani national mistakenly described as Kuwaiti because he was born there – himself lived in Pakistan before moving to Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden and presented the idea that became the 9/11 operation. He remains imprisoned in Guantanamo.Other senior al-Qaida figures followed similar trajectories. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002 as was Ramzi bin al-Shibh; KSM was captured in Rawalpindi the following year. And bin Laden himself, the man who had spent years as the world’s most wanted terrorist, was finally found not in some inaccessible Afghan cave but in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than two miles from the country’s premier military academy. US forces killed him there in May 2011.That history gives Indian analysts pause when Washington’s gaze once again settles overwhelmingly on Afghanistan — and, unsurprisingly now, Iran — because the US typically takes a more benign view of client states such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Post reports that al-Qaida’s current leader, Egyptian Saif al-Adel, is believed to be hiding in Iran.New Delhi has often questioned why Pakistan’s role in the movement’s historical infrastructure so often receives less sustained scrutiny; Afghanistan is landlocked, but it is not hermetically sealed. It borders Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. Historically, however, Pakistan has been the principal southern gateway connecting Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea and the wider world. Peshawar, Karachi and the tribal belt repeatedly figured in the logistics of the Afghan jihad and later transnational militancy.While this does not make Pakistan responsible for every terrorist who passed through it, it does, however, make Pakistan a key part of the story. The 1993 Bombay bombings, the 2001 attack on Parliament and, later, the 2008 Mumbai attacks were part of a long continuum of terrorism in South Asia.The Indian government has repeatedly described Pakistan-based militant organizations with ties to a wider “jihad” as a central component of that threat. The 26/11 attackers, for example, departed from Karachi, hijacked an Indian fishing vessel and sailed to Mumbai to carry out one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in history. US authorities subsequently described LET as responsible for the attacks but have moved at a snail’s pace in helping bring the masterminds of the attack to justice.While the LeT itself was established in Afghanistan’s Kunar province in 1986, it subsequently focused its attention on India. Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaida operative, was captured at an LeT safehouse in Faisalabad, demonstrating that the two networks could overlap operationally.
