Al Qaeda could ‘attack’ US in a year, top US general tells Senate

AP | Washington

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Top US general Mark Milley has warned Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan could threaten the US in as little as 12 months. The Taliban had not broken ties with the group responsible for 9/11 and themselves remained a terror organisation, said Gen Milley, who was appointed to his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by former US President Donald Trump and retained by President Joe Biden.

General Milley cited “a very real possibility” that Al Qaeda or the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate could reconstitute in Afghanistan under Taliban rule and present a terrorist threat to the US in the next 12 to 36 months.

He and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin are being questioned in the Senate Armed Services Committee about last month’s pullout from Afghanistan. The government collapsed as the Taliban rapidly advanced through the country.

Senator and committee leader Jack Reed said lawmakers wanted to understand whether the US “missed indicators” of the government’s collapse. The US has said it will now move towards counter-terrorism missions.

The hearing, held by the Senate armed services committee, comes weeks after a chaotic withdrawal at Kabul airport as foreign powers sought to get their citizens home and thousands of desperate Afghans begged for rescue. A suicide attack killed 182 people during the withdrawal operation. Thirteen US service personnel and at least 169 Afghans were killed by the airport gate on 26 August.

Harder

General Milley said it would now be harder to protect Americans from terrorist attacks from Afghanistan. Gen. Milley said he made an assessment in late 2020 that an accelerated troop withdrawal from Afghanistan could precipitate the government’s collapse. But both he and Austin testified that the speed of the collapse caught the US military off-guard.

“We helped build a state, but we could not forge a nation,” Austin said. “The fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away – in many cases without firing a shot – took us all by surprise.”