Irregular Warfare Podcast - Afghanistan Three Years Later: Alliances and Rivalries

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Episode 113 examines the challenges presented by the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) in Afghanistan within the context of the three-year anniversary of U.S. withdrawal from the region.   Our guests share their extensive backgrounds, research, and practical experience related to the emergence of ISK in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They define the current operational environment that exists in the region with a particular focus on the power vacuum created by U.S. withdrawal in August of 2021. They then delve into how ISK adopted a two-pronged strategy of forging key alliances and rivalries to exploit tensions and build a diverse talent pipeline for their organization. Our guests also offer insight into the challenges of defining and addressing the ISK threat by evaluating the feasibility and limitations of “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capabilities. Finally, they provide policy and strategy considerations for the future of counterterrorism operations.   Andrew Mines is a senior program specialist in the Asia Center at the United States Institute of Peace. He is the co-author of the book, The Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Strategic Alliances and Rivalries, which is the foundation for today’s conversation.  LTC Paul Lushenko is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Special Operations at the U.S. Army War College. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in International Relations from Cornell University. Paul has deployed continuously, directing intelligence operations at the Battalion, Combined Task Force, and Joint Task Force levels. In his most recent operational assignment, Paul served as the Senior Intelligence Officer for the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan.   Frank Struzinski and Julia McClenon are the hosts for Episode 113. Please reach out to them with any questions about this episode or the Irregular Warfare Podcast.   The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a production of the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI). We are a team of volunteers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners in the field of irregular warfare. IWI generates written and audio content, coordinates events for the IW community, and hosts critical thinkers in the field of irregular warfare as IWI fellows. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.   Subscribe to our monthly newsletter for access to our written content, upcoming community events, and other resources.

And so that ability to push through despite all the pressures of the environment and become one of the deadliest organizations and now one of the most renowned terrorist organizations on the planet left us wondering what explains ISK's rise and its ability to be resilient and remain a competitive group in this landscape. Is this tension between preparing for the possibility of great power war with China or Russia, the pacing threat, versus the likelihood that we're going to continue to do everything we've been doing for the last 20 or so years? And so the question becomes, how do we not throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms

of soft competencies and capabilities? In other words, how do we optimize soft to do great power competition concomitant to all the other irregular warfare missions, operations that we've asked them to do? In fact, they are doing currently. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

I'm your host, Frank Shuzensky. my co-host today is Julia McClennan. In today's episode, we discuss the challenges presented by the Islamic State Coruscant, or ISK, in Afghanistan within the context of the three-year anniversary of U.S. withdrawal from the region. Our guests begin by outlining the emergence of ISK in Afghanistan and the current operational environment that exists in the region. From there, they delve into how ISK adopted a two-pronged strategy of forging key alliances and rivalries to exploit tensions and build a diverse talent pipeline for their organization.

Finally, our guests offer insight into the challenges of defining and addressing the ISK threat, including the feasibility and limitations of over-the-horizon counterterrorism capabilities after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Andrew Minds is a senior program specialist in the Asia Center at the United States Institute of Peace. He is the co-author of the book, The Islamic State and Afghanistan and Pakistan, Strategic Alliances and Rivalries, which is the foundation for today's conversation. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Lushenko is an assistant professor

and the director of special operations at US Army War College. He earned his PhD and MA in international relations from Cornell University. Paul has deployed continuously, directing intelligence operations at the battalion, combined task force, and joint task force levels. In his most recent operational assignment,

Paul served as the senior intelligence officer for the joint special operations task force levels. In his most recent operational assignment, Paul served as the senior intelligence officer for the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern Warfare Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare

professionals. Here's our conversation with Andrew and Paul. Andrew, Paul, thanks for joining us on the irregular warfare podcast. Thanks for having us. Looking forward to the conversation. Pleasure to be here. Andrew, we found your book, the Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan, strategic alliances and rivalries, co-authored with Amir Jadoon, fascinating deep dive of Islamic state course on from their inception to us withdrawal from Strategic Alliances and Rivalries co-authored with Amir Jadoon, Fascinating Deep Dive of Islamic State Khorasan from their inception to US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Can you discuss your motivation for research and writing?

Sure. The book really came about because of these two distinctions between the pressure of the environment in which the Islamic State Khorasan, ISK, was operating. And it's for a terrorist organization, what can only be described as its high performance metrics. However you wanted to find a terrorist organization, just the ability to push through and really perform within the global Islamic State movement. So what do I mean by that? In terms of the pressure that ISK, Islamic State Khorasan, was facing. You had both a landscape that was dominated by the Taliban, an insurgency that had been dominant for decades to that

point, had the legacy and the local networks and expertise to really push through and was fighting the US-led coalition and the local Afghan government at that point. You had a local al-Qaeda-linked organization and the central leadership of al-Qaeda, mostly based in the region, partnering with the Taliban, the history that goes all the way back to the 1980s of working with the Taliban and the early networks there all the way back to the Afghan Soviet war. And so a really entrenched al-Qaeda group there, as well as one of the largest concentrations of coalition firepower and assets of anywhere on the globe.

And so these three things pushed for an environment that really wasn't conducive to a new movement, the Islamic State, coming in and trying to compete amongst all those pressures. And yet you see after ISK, Islamic State Coruscant is formed in 2015, rapidly pushing through onto the landscape. By 2018, it's the fourth deadliest terrorist organization on the planet. 2021, of course, during the evacuation, everybody will sure remember the deadly bombing that killed hundreds, including 13 US service members. And by 2022, after the US and the international coalition had left Afghanistan, ISK is now the third deadliest terrorist

organization in the planet. Great. Thank you so much, Andrew, for setting us up. Actually, dovetails nicely into our next question for Paul. So, Paul, you've done a lot of research and writing on the US approach to targeting Afghanistan, looking specifically at effects on ISK leadership. Now that we are three years post-US withdrawal from Afghanistan, how do you assess how ISK has adapted to the changing environment? Yeah, it's a really important question. Before I delve into my thoughts on this topic, I want to say first and foremost, thanks again for the opportunity to be here. It's a phenomenal book that Andrew and Amira, both colleagues of mine, have put together. I assigned it,

for instance, to my recent course on special Operations Forces at the U.S. Army War College. And so it's certainly getting a lot of play among War College staff, faculty, and students in shaping how we understand the continued resiliency and surprising resiliency of this organization. And so as I took a look at this question, I think there's really four different ways that we can understand the evolution of ISIS-K in the post-U.S. intervention environments, from August 2021 to present. The first is, I think, clearly ISIS-K has capitalized on a security vacuum that resulted in the wake of not just the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the region, but certainly

with its leadership and hierarchy within the region, but certainly with its leadership and hierarchy within the region and globally, the coalition effort in Afghanistan. And this has been important for the ability of ISIS-K to consolidate and reorganize and to emphasize more outreach and external operations that I'm sure we'll talk about here shortly. The second point, and this has been a consistent Achilles heel for US efforts within the country and the region, and certainly other countries who have attempted to stabilize the region for near-political gains. So here I'm thinking about the USSR, former USSR, and other countries as well, is the

sanctuary that Pakistan has provided to ISIS-K, similar to what it's done for other terrorist organizations such as the Kani Network, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, TTP, so on and so forth. And it's important and bears repeating that this region is actually the home not just to the Islamic State in the Khorazan province, which is also known as ISK or ISIS-K, but also 20 or so violent extremist organizations. And Pakistan, in every case, has provided a sanctuary in its border tribal lands, what was called the Duran Line, the federally administered tribal areas.

As anecdotal evidence here, if we can't see it enough in policy statements, is as an intelligence officer who once led the intelligence apparatus for our Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan, we would see after consistent high frequency targeting of this group in Nangarhar, so Eastern Afghanistan, that the organization literally in total would have scorned across the border to Pakistan to find sanctuary to consolidate and reorganize. And so this consistent problem challenge of Pakistan sanctuary is grown more important in the last couple of years after the US withdrawal. The other thing we can't discount here is the lack of legitimacy politically that the

Taliban has that hasn't stymied social political economic grievances among Afghan citizens, but in some cases, increase those, providing the Islamic State and the Khorazan province as a puritanical organization, the ability to connect with and to legitimize among Afghan citizens, its sort of mission to broaden the Islamic caliphate across this region, which is known colloquially as the Khorazan province. And so for me, Pakistan grievances, security vacuum have combined to encourage the Islamic state as the fourth largest, most brilliant lethal organization, as Andrew has put it

internationally, to focus not inward against, let's say, the Taliban, but outward and broadcasting its message to certainly the Central Asian states, but also well beyond. And so for these sort of complex reasons, I see the landscape shifting significantly in the region, which has important implications for U.S. policy and strategy going forward. Paul, thanks for that great deep dive. And going to Andrew, before we jump into the main argument of your book, can you provide some context on ISK's operational environment in Afghanistan and Pakistan for listeners that are less familiar with the

complex dynamics at play? Yeah, absolutely. I think Paul gave a fantastic deep dive in that strategic overview of how things stand today. But we go back to ISK's formation back in 2014, 15, there were this unique combination of timely synchronous factors, but also endemic factors to the region that really helped the group mobilize in this environment. So we think about synchronous factors, just things that were going on at the time. I think three really stand out. One is that the caliphate in Iraq and Syria, ISIS's so-called caliphate, had just been declared.

And there was a global momentum, constant news coverage worldwide, real excitement and fervor within the global jihadist movement for this caliphate. And so that had just come. Around the same time, you know, about 2014 is the end of a really long coalition, US-led coalition air campaign in the tribal areas that Paul

was speaking about, as well as the Pakistani army pushing through the tribal areas and really trying to push out a lot of these terrorist organizations, either decimate them or push them over into Afghanistan. And so there was a large exodus of seasoned militants into Afghanistan, coming on the wake of these two campaigns. And also this was a point in time when the Taliban, much different in 2017 onwards, but at that point was looking relatively weak. News had just broke in about 2015 that Mullah Omar was dead.

The head of the Taliban was dead and he had been for two years. The movement, the Taliban were grappling with that legacy and the news of his death, reports on fragmentation and the real risk of fragmentation within the Taliban was very serious. So there's just really unique things going on right at this moment when ISK is about to form in 2015. And then there are these endemic factors, these long standing things that just define this region and have done so for decades. As Paul mentioned, the highest concentration of terrorist groups of anywhere in the world is right there in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area. You have decades of jihadist legacy that's produced those organizations and seasoned militant expertise and networks within them, dating all the way back to the Afghan-Soviet

War, the 1970s and 80s. And then you also have a longer, we'd call it prophetic legacy methodology that the global jihadist movement takes very seriously, which is that the prophetic legacy tells of the army of the Messiah under black flags coming forth from the region of Khorasan, this region, to declare the end times. The Messiah is here. And so when you have all of those things combined, the momentum and the human terrain, but also the physical space and the physical terrain to support and sustain not just all those terrorist groups that we've talked about, the Taliban of course, but also an ascent insurgency like ISK. Hey Frank, before we jump forward, I wonder if I could just add two thoughts here.

I think that we're again at another inflection point based upon the recent ISK, ISIS-K, the Islamic State in the Khorazan province, how we want to determine its attack in Moscow that resulted in something like 130 dead and several hundred more wounded, which is to say this. There are assumptions surrounding what ISIS-K is or is not that we continue to debate, right? And so when I was again at J2 in Afghanistan for Joint Special Operations Task Force, that is the continued conversation I would have with senior leaders up to Mick Nicholson's

level, General Miller's level as well, is to what degree is ISK a deadly nuisance or a strategic threat? And we haven't actually settled that debate, notwithstanding what I think we all will assess is increasing external operations capability, which is to say the ability to inspire naval and direct attacks abroad. And by the way, that was the narrative that the task force gave senior leaders up through the National Security Council at the time of my deployments at least, which is we ought to fight this group here in Afghanistan in the region, unless we incur attacks against our homeland. The other assumption, which I think is two sides of the same coin here, is the Taliban's

ability to disrupt, to defeat ISIS-K. And this was an interesting conversation that we continued to confront in the wake of our withdrawals, the extent to which the Taliban can actually manage this threat. And I think that these two assumptions, in addition to what Andrew gave us, really helped to outline and contextualize the threat as it stands within the region at this point. Nicole Sarris Andrew, so you argue that ISIS-K adopted a two-pronged strategy of forging key alliances and rivalries, which allowed it to exploit intra- and intergroup tensions and build a diverse and continually

replenishable talent pipeline. So how did ISK navigate the selection of those key relationships to achieve their goals? Yeah, and we'll go back and forth between this formation period and then the current environment today. And I think there are really important lessons learned from this formation period from 2014 into 2015 and 16 that should stick with us today as we think about the really complex challenges that Paul posed there. And so when we built the book, this was based on work that we'd already done. Amir Jadun, who's now at Clemson, formerly at West Point,

a professor, and I had done on how ISK had gone about entering this space and forming those alliances that you talked about, Julia, but also picking out really stark rivalries. So that two-pronged approach. And what happens in 2014 is over the course of the year, as momentum is building in Iraq and Syria and excitement for the caliphate movement and the ambition for a truly global movement is gaining strength,

we see delegations coming from that theater to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Outreach to local organizations like Al Qaeda, like the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban, like the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, IMU, and other organizations from, call them IS Central, Islamic State Central, called ISIS. People might know it by different things, but I'll just go ahead and say to ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. So those delegations are coming out throughout 2014 and well into 2015 to basically say, who would be interested in forming a front for the Islamic State here in Khorasan? You would be the official province of the Islamic State Caliphate in the Khorasan

region. And so a lot of commanders and their fighters found that very appealing. So there were a number of Pakistani Taliban factions, subgroups within the Pakistani Taliban, which had suffered a lot of pressure from that campaign I was describing earlier, a lot of cracks forming, loss at the top, leaving these leadership vacuums. And so many from TTP, the Pakistani Taliban,

were pretty susceptible to that message. There were more hardline elements of Al-Qaeda that were tired of what the organization had become under the successor to Osama bin Laden, Aiman El-Zawahiri. And so they saw this as existential. The caliphate is here, now is the time. Why do we exist if not for this, for statehood?

The time is now, and so they found that argument very compelling. Members of the Taliban themselves, those hardline members that Paul was describing, also joined up. Central Asian contingents in groups like IMU, the Islamic movement of respects and other organizations found that message appealing. And so there were all of these organizations, this patchwork of groups that were very susceptible to that outreach. And so what essentially the Taliban realized at this point, as these groups are coming together and pledging allegiance to the caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the time in Iraq and Syria is that we have a real problem on our hands.

And so what they did was they basically sent a formal letter to the caliph, to al-Baghdadi, saying we need to present a united jihadist front here in the Horasan region. And this was just simply unacceptable to IS. Al-Baghdadi flatly refused it. And that actually created the original tensions between the Taliban and ISK that has emerged into all-out war. And at various points in what came after 2014 and 15, a lot of fierce clashes between the two organizations. And so ISK, as the local province of the Islamic State, has an ideological compulsion to resist the Taliban.

Now that the state is here, all other jihadist organizations are null. You must declare allegiance to the state. And there is only one legitimate fight, and that is the fight we are pursuing. You either join or we're going to compete, co-opt, and do a bunch of other things to try and degrade your areas and poach from your fighters. And so that's the rivalries piece. There are also all these other organizations, like I was describing, some of which I didn't mention. Again, highly concentrated area with dozens of terrorist organizations that had been operating for a long time, who are kind of sitting looking at this environment saying,

okay, how are we going to react? Maybe we've been aligned with the Taliban for a long time, but this global movement seems really serious. We also believe in things that they believe. Maybe we should cooperate with them on certain things. Maybe we should pledge allegiance to. And so for ISK, they take a look at that and say, okay, if you don't want to pledge allegiance and fully join our organization, that's fine. But we're going to work with you on specific areas too. You really need a logistics and a supply chain coming through from Pakistan, those areas

that Paul was describing. We really need a logistics and a supply chain coming through from Pakistan, those areas that Paul was describing. We really need a front up north. Your organization is best placed to help us build out the networks and the expertise to expand, to project power, and to build our reputation in these crucial years. It's that two-pronged approach. Alliances and rivalries, they each bring their unique strengths, and it's a really powerful

way for an organization that's just getting started to become more competitive, gain more control, gain more experience, and eventually diminish the gap, a very, very serious gap between their capabilities and where they want to be as an insurgency. Thanks, Andrew, for that insight. I think that's a really great and powerful analogy to understand how a non-state actor like ISK thinks about how they conduct actions. So for Paul, from 2015 to 2021, ISK conducted a very deliberate campaign of comprehensive attacks supplemented by their messaging campaign. Attacks surge from 2015 to 2018, they fell sharply in 2019, and then saw another resurgence from

2020 to 2021. So how does a resurgent organization like ISK manage the threshold of violence in this complex environment of competing state and non-state actors? Yeah, this is a really important question. I think it gets back to the heart of the matter of the book that Amira and Andrew put together, the key question of which is, you know, what explains this group's surprising resiliency? And I think that this sort of John S. Faye's perspective mechanisms, if you will, of alliances, you know, what he talked about as well, is really important to understand, but it's only part of the story. Because what we teach our

officers at the field grade and coronal level, like here at the War College, is the enemy is not a potted plant. So I think paraphrase one of these leading war theorists like Clausewitz may be. In fact, conflict is really a two-way street of action, reaction, and counteraction. So as I step back and I take a look at the way that ISK's operational approach has evolved over the timeframe, it really comes down to shifting inward and external priorities that are linked inextricably to the coalition at the time, the coalition's counterterrorism strategy. And so if you take a look at broad evolutions, phases, if you will, of ISK's operations in Afghanistan, I think it's useful to think about them in terms of three

different phases. First was back to the 2015 timeframe that Andrew had talked about, establishing a toehold within Afghanistan and indeed the region for all the reasons that Andrew had talked about. What this resulted in was, again, a debate surrounding the degree to which ISK was a deadly nuisance or strategic threat. And for the most part, based upon our operations, and you were there in Iraq and Syria against IS Central, we prioritized the campaign against this organization in Iraq versus Afghanistan. In other words, Afghanistan became an

economy of forced mission, which had important implications for the counterterrorism strategy, if in fact you could call it that. Mostly it was a function of direct action raids, it gets critical vulnerabilities, think financing, communication, media, so on and so forth, but also the occasional drone strike against especially high profile, high payoff targets, which I think set the conditions conceptually for this so-called over the horizon strategy, which I hope we have time to talk about here shortly, is we transition forward from about 2017 to 2019. What we get is a real interest to capitalize on badlands

of Nangarhar and that mountainous region within eastern Afghanistan to expand not just within this area of Afghanistan, but further to the West to create what we call an RSLI point, you know, reception staging, onward movement of foreign fighters, some of which were coming from the central Asian states, but some of which were also coming from the Middle East, is there was a connection between IS Maine and ISIS K is the key regional readout affiliate with this important region. What this meant for the coalition was a shift from disruption to an interest in defeating the organization and really an emphasis on the military instrument of power, again, raids and drone strikes. And then finally in 2019, leading to the

withdrawal, is a real interest to convey internationally the place of this regional affiliate for ISK Maine as sort of the leading vanguard for consolidation of a global UMA or Califit. And here, I think you should get really where ISK has adjusted its threshold of violence, mediated or calibrated that in terms of the grievances, Pakistan sanctuary, as well as the security vacuum that the United States has created, frankly. And so here what we get is more of an emphasis on external operations and inspiration enabling

directing, as well as, and Amir has talked about this in recent work, and the CTC, the Sentinel, the Counterterrorism Center's Sentinel Journal from West Point, she's talked about with her colleagues an evolution of the social media footprint of ISK to certainly exacerbate grievances among Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the Central Asian states that indeed has resulted in a lot of recruitment for these external fighters and external operations. And so it seems like a pretty easy question, but it's more than just ISK. It's a learning organization and it's been informed by evolutions and clear evolutions and distinct phases of counterterrorism operations

and strategy from the United States and its coalition partners. Nicole Soule Thanks so much, Paul. I feel like you two are sort of reading our minds on what we want to be asking you next. Again, just dovetails in very well to where we're going with this. And so this question, we're going to pitch it to Andrew at first, but Paul, you mentioned kind of the shift to the rise in strategy, and we'd love to hear from you on this as well. So, Andrew, your research highlights a significant effort by ISK to develop doctrine and manuals to support their operations. This demonstrates a sophisticated and deliberate

approach to warfare by a non-state actor. Can you talk about how ISK views the phases of their insurgency? Yeah, and I'll first mention some work for anybody who wants to, you know, there's only so much we can do in this conversation. If you want to do more deep dives and get into the primary source material itself. Our colleagues, Haror Ingram, Craig Whiteside, who fought a lot of the, we could call them predecessors in Iraq and Syria, and Charlie Winter in their book, The ISIS Reader, which focused on the core IS central in Iraq and Syria. Haror Ingram's also written a report called The La Longi Had, which really looks through these core doctrinal texts of this movement.

And we should really think about this movement dating back to the 1990s from the early formation. And the idea is just getting started in some of its founding members. And so it's very important to trace the legacy of these organizations and also the key milestone texts that have come to define them that they take

very seriously, that their top leadership produce and their fighters actually read and practice in terms of how they conduct their campaigns, how they pursue attacks and adjust to the different environments they're in. So these guys take doctrine very seriously. How they think about insurgency is more or less how Maoists, guerrillas might think about insurgency, how other guerrilla movements over the course of history have thought about insurgency. And so it comes in five phases. How do we know that it comes in five phases? Because they've written on it and they've produced it for English language audiences themselves. You know, one of the first publications towards

an English language audience that comes out of Iraq and Syria from ISIS, the caliphate, is a magazine called Dabak in that they outline the extension of core doctrinal texts that key strategic thinkers within this long movement have developed, which is this five-phased approach to insurgency. So I've written on this with Herrera and he's done that deep dive in the Longia. Please check it out to any listeners that are catching on, but the five phases are these. First, I'll use the Arabic and then in the English. Hijra, migration to an area. Jama, organization, third, Tawahush, or you could call it destabilization is probably the best translation, fourth is Temkin, consolidation, and then finally

Khilafah, statehood, migration, organization, destabilization, consolidation, and statehood. destabilization, consolidation, and statehood. And so across these five phases, the group adjusts each of its different activities accordingly, it has different capabilities, it has different personnel, it structures its groups differently at different points. When we get to that point of statehood, IS, the global movement defines very clearly departments that are devoted to almsgiving

and different forms of governance, to military operations, to judicial functions, to policing. Much farther down in those phases when you're just pursuing attacks in urban areas and you're trying to create the conditions in which statehood might be possible someday far down the road. Destabilization activities, much different, much different. Very heavily focused on attacks, on carving out space in rural areas, in remote areas for the insurgency to have as that safe haven to build out training camps, to build out the capacity to properly launch a campaign down the road to seize district centers, to seize villages and towns, to seize ultimately capitals like they did in Mosul,

like they did in Iraq, in Syria with Raqqa, like ISIS-K did on major district centers in Afghanistan. And so this five-phased approach is very generic, but it outlines the ways in which each of the organizations affiliates, whether it's in Afghanistan, whether it's in Iraq, Syria, West Africa, East Africa, Southeast Asia, wherever the movement is. If you follow this approach, this is the thinking behind doctrine. We promise you, if you adhere to this approach, and if you faithfully implement it and tailor it to your own local environment, you will at some point achieve statehood. So that's the phased approach.

ISK has very seriously adopted it. I think the most important publication is one that's been distributed and translated for all of the global provinces of the Islamic State. It's called This Is Our Method, This Is Our Creed, This Is Our Manhaj, This Is Our Aqeedah. These are the things that govern the Islamic State global movement. It's been republished in local languages for an ISK audience in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was republished in English. This is a core doctrinal text that the group uses. It's reflected in other major publications by ISK leaders and figures. And so that is the guiding principle behind the

movement. Andrew, thanks for outlining that five-phase framework. I think our audience will find that pretty fascinating. And overall, there's some great similarities between the US framework for unconventional warfare and ISK doctrine for mounting the resurgence, whether it's in Afghanistan or in Iraq and Syria. To go over to Paul, I kind of want to go back to a point you mentioned earlier when discussing the recent ISK attack in Moscow in March 22nd. So ISK showed operational reach for the organization beyond their

traditional area of operation in Central and South Asia. So what was their motivation to do so and what are the implications for US interests? This is a great question. Again, it takes us back to this core inflection point which I think we're at in determining what ISK is or is not, which again has these serious implications for policy and strategy. So I think before I give at least one perspective on what this attack means for ISK's expanded operational reach, I think we have to define clearly what an external operation is, because it's not clearly defined across the interagency and indeed across the joint force. For me, and what we communicated to senior political and military officials is external operations isn't necessarily ability for ISK in Nangarhar, in the FADA, the Federal Ministry of

Tribal Areas to in itself conduct an operation, let's say in Germany or in France. In other words, to deploy an ISK ideologue fighter from Nangarhar through an airport in Bagram or Kabul, through Turkey to get into, infiltrate France and Germany or another European country, in this case, to conduct an operation. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about here is the ability for ISK, in large measure due to the doctrine and ideology that Andrew has adumbrated, to inspire, to enable, to direct attacks from sanctuary in Afghanistan.

That's really how we define external operations. And seen in that light, you can see lethality as a key measure of effectiveness for this organization is something that's really disconcerting, right? Because whereas ISK isn't necessarily doing the operation of itself, these fighters, as I just laid out, it's certainly inspiring enabling and directing folks to do this. So this brings us to Moscow and what this meant for the group. And the question becomes, what was the motivation here? I think there was probably three principal motivations at a high level, at least for

this operation. The first is that it reflects again the learning organization that ISK is, that it could craft and shape its social media outreach, especially through encrypted social media applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, the like, to connect with sympathizers within especially Tajikistan and Uzbekistan that could do the group's bidding on its behalf. Again, it means inspiration, the enablement, the direction coming by way of these social media applications. In this way, secondly, I think that ISK has capitalized on longstanding grievances among Muslims within Russia going back to the first and second Chechen wars. And there's a lot of better experts on this particular

set of conflicts than me to explain the intricacies here, but suffice it to say these longstanding social, economic, political, cultural, even grievances that are ripe to be exacerbated by the Islamic State in the Khorazan province and disconnected through these social media applications with Tajiks and Uzbeks especially. And finally, I think, is that notwithstanding that Russia, I think, does have a security state and is managed by a selectorate all the way up through Putin and this sort of facile democracy, which is Russia, there are perceived vulnerabilities in this country of Russia.

I mean, it's a massive landmass. It's hard to control. There's always shifting alliances down to the local level. And so I think that there was a perception of vulnerabilities within this country, certainly given the involvement of Russia within its war with Ukraine on its border, right, that allowed an opportunity for ISK to exploit. And so I think there's a real interest to continue to capitalize on perceived vulnerabilities based upon other security priorities, not just in Europe from ISIS-K's

perspective, but also in the US homeland that we have to really be concerned about. Before we jump into Over the Horizon, I think Paul raises a great point here, which is that this is something that has frequently come up with ISIS-K, ISK, with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which is that when these attacks, these quote unquote, external operations that we don't clearly define happen, then it becomes alarm signals. And then there's a bit of a debate that happens, which is, oh, this is the sign of a weak organization. Because they can't do what they want to do in Afghanistan, they're trying to do attacks externally, and that's the sign of a weak organization. And this isn't necessarily the case. When we think about how the movement defines and pursues external operations, I think the

better term for them is expeditionary operations. When you put yourself into the mindset of the movement and then read their core doctrine for how they approach this, they are expeditionary operations. Whether you're pushing from one district in Nagar, Paul's mentioning the group's hub in Afghanistan, what was historically ISK's hub in Afghanistan in Nangar, and you're moving from one district, two districts over, it's an expeditionary operation. It's one type of work. If you're moving transnationally, and they did this, this was, you know, Moscow, the writing was on the wall with an operation like that. Leading up to that, 2022,

three attempts and actual attacks in all of the border countries around Afghanistan. Go around the map. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Iran, attacks or attempted attacks with high lethality in all of them. So you've got those transnational expeditionary operations. Yeah. You know, here's the real irony too, just to jump in, because this gets back to the policy debate is that how do you communicate that in a compelling way to policymakers who don't want to hear about Afghanistan anymore, right? Because there's an overriding interest in preparing for, God forbid, a great power conflict

with especially China as our nation's pacing threat as per the national security strategy within the Indo-Asian Pacific. And so I think as military academics, as scholars, what we have to do is use falsifiable data to create a narrative that justifies continued expenditure of resources and focus on Afghanistan, even amid the withdrawal. So what do I mean? We have to explain clearly and by way of numbers what the lethality for ISIS-K looks like. And by the way, we can do this. I mean, there is a strand of political science research methodology called natural experiments,

which attempts to approximate a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard for experiment in political science, by way of just observations. So you can take a look, and I'm doing this work actually with Amir Juhuddin and a colleague at Cornell at this point, you can take a look at the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan in 2021. And you can actually figure out the causal effect on ISIS case lethality, again, defined in terms of inspiration, enabling, and directing. That's the way I think we communicate to policymakers who are interested in putting more meat on

the bone for what this group is or is not. But right now, my humble opinion is we have a real narrative problem coming from this really rich research on ISK that would justify continued focus on this region to include things like the deployment of counterterrorism forces to Central Asia, especially intelligence sharing capability that will give us leverage over what the heck is happening within Afghanistan. So we've got one more kind of meaty question before we move on to policy considerations and kind of your thoughts or recommendations around that.

So for this question, we'll go to Andrew first and then Paul. The term over the horizon capabilities is used quite frequently post-US withdrawal from Afghanistan. So how would both of you define the term over the horizon capabilities in the context of Afghanistan and is this even a feasible option for US policymakers? Paul Matzkoff Well, I'm going to humbly and most likely get this wrong and then Paul can correct me afterwards but I'll give it a shot as someone on the researchers side of things and Paul, of course, wears the scholar practitioner hat. So Paul, please correct me when I stuff

this up. But over the horizon, kind of three buckets of what that looks like when you do not have significant assets in country to deploy and to manage a threat like ISIS-K. What are your alternatives? You can do just over the horizon. So outside of the country, nearby, maybe in one of the Central Asian states, maybe in Pakistan, the deployment of resources, of assets to conduct operations against a group like ISIS-K in Afghanistan. So just over the horizon. Not too far away, but it's not in country. You do distant over the horizon. So now we're properly looking at distance here and we're coming from somewhere in maybe the Gulf,

flying assets hundreds of thousands of miles into a country, which we've done, by the way. I think the operation that targeted Al-Qaeda's leader, Aiman al-Zawahiri, many might remember from 2022 in July, was one that was flown from some distance. So we've got distant over the horizon. And then kind of this weird in-between bucket of sea-based. So from assets somewhere in maybe the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea, that could look like cruise missiles going into strike targets somewhere in Afghanistan. It could be, again, UAV or fighter assets going in, ISR.

And so you have these three buckets of ways that we can think about, okay, we're no longer in the country. How do we get different types of assets to survey an area, to gather intelligence so that we can then maybe think about finishing or conducting a strike on an actual target in the country. I think right now, there is a real strategic mismatch between that posture of over the horizon is able to achieve what it's designed to do and the threat landscape that we've done a lot of work describing that we've ever talked about here in this episode and that there's just a real mismatch

between what we can do with Over the Horizon and what the nature of the threat is today. I think when we talk about Over the Horizon, what we're talking about really is drone warfare. And so that begs the question, how do you define drone warfare? And here there's a lot more than actually meets the eye. It's very, very complicated and is not often treated as such.

And what you see mostly among scholars and the French practitioners who study so-called drone warfare is an appreciation of this practice due to the platform itself. So let's say the Reaper, the Barakatar, any number of armed and networked drones, so focus simply just on terrorism and indeed targeted killing, although that's not really the counter-fort internationally mandatory law. And at the worst case is conflating remote warfare,

which is a lot of what Frank does through surrogate proxy forces, foreign internal defense, with drone warfare. But yet we know remote warfare comes in a variety of shades. And so my contribution, this is what I did my doctoral research on at Cornell University, is to think about drone warfare as a function of over the horizon as really a product of two functions, two mechanisms, right? One is the evolving use of drones.

It can be a tactical use. It can be a strategic use. So on the battlefield or like a policy or strategy. And then the other is constraints that evolve, especially in the United States, due to things like the reasonable or near certainty standards. So these standards govern the degree to which we expect anticipate collateral damage, mostly civilian casualties following drone strikes.

And so if you're with me here, when you bring together use and constraint, you get key patterns of drone warfare that are evolving globally. And I think when we talk about over the horizon, what we're talking about is the strategic use of a drone with nothing more than unilateral oversight, again, meaning that the United States is conducting these strikes where it wants, when it wants, why it wants, how it wants without multilateral oversight from key security fora, such as, let's say, the United Nations or any number of regional organizations, so the African Union or Central Asian equivalents as well.

And so having said that, what's the seat feasibility of this over the horizon approach to actually nip ISIS-K in the bud? I would say as two sides of the same coin, one is it's too feasible. What we actually have in drone warfare for over-the-risin purposes is a moral hazard. It's easy to use drones in an economy of forced mission. Therefore, we're going to continue to do so. And you have to look no further than the drone president, ironically President Barack Obama, to understand the slippery, especially moral and legal slope that comes with using drones as a first among other option

or moral hazard. And on the other hand, in terms of feasibility, what we see, and again, don't believe me, believe people like Joe Votel, who just lectured my course at the War College, or General McKenzie, who I just talked about about this recently. Believe them. What we see here is an infeasibility to actually achieve our overarching strategic interest as Andrew's laid out. For a variety of really understandable sort of material considerations, think about this,

access basing and overflight. These drones, which are celebrated for persistent overwatch, actually have no what we call in the military legs, quote unquote. They've got no persistent because they're flying from some base in Qatar. There's no on station time. There's no access basing or overflight. They have no operational reach because of that. There's no intelligence sharing because we have virtually no footprint within the Central

Asian States to have leverage over what's happening within Afghanistan. And then finally, is you can't really conduct battle damage assessment, even if you consider that you conduct strikes in the first place. And so ultimately what you have to do, and I've written extensively about this, is you have to integrate over the rising capabilities like drones especially, into a more comprehensive, and I hate to use this term, but you know, it's du jour,

into a more comprehensive whole of government approach that allows you to disrupt ISK. this term, but you know, it's du jour, into a more comprehensive whole of government approach that allows you to disrupt ISK. That's probably the most feasible tactical task here, while also trying to legitimize a other political authority within the government, within the country, which is not the Taliban. And that creates a whole set of other political issues that my colleagues and I in a new book on Afghanistan and international relations are discussing right now, which I'm happy to talk about. But I said a lot about Over the Rise and I think ultimately it seems like an easy button to use these drones, but there are real consequences that we're confronting.

We'll continue to confront as well going forward. Thanks for those two great perspectives. And I think it's a great way to kind of wrap up the main part of our discussion. And now we're going to transition to kind of some big picture policy implications. So this question is for both of you, but I'll direct it to Andrew first. Based on today's conversations, what are the major considerations for policymakers, academics, and practitioners who are interested in a regular warfare? I think we have to start with that mismatch that we've talked about. So just takeaways from this conversation is the mismatch between what we're postured to

do, what our appetite is to do right now, speaking to policymakers here in Afghanistan, and what we have the capability to do. So there's that mismatch. There's also the question of legacy issues. And by legacy issues, I mean a large contingent of Central Asians who have come back from the theater in Iraq and Syria and are being processed in their countries of origin right now. The legacy of fighters who were with ISK, who were broken out, maybe are still in different detention facilities, maybe are lingering around somewhere. And so the legacy issues of, quote,

unquote, the caliphate days, and clearly a push from ISK to carry on that legacy and to fight for those populations, to create and foster and really leverage those grievances Paul was speaking about earlier, to carry on into the next generation. So those are real legacy issues. I think the rapid internationalization of what ISK has done, we've talked about that

at many points in this episode, but being able to push for a just completely different and wider target audience and message to each of them accurately and persuasively and mobilize within a much wider range of target audiences that has far more expanded geographic reach than at any point in ISK's history. That's concerning. And also to be prepared for worst case scenarios. Coming back to this approach to insurgency that ISK has adopted, that the Islamic State as a movement takes very seriously.

What do we think are our worst case scenarios here? Are we prepared for a future where an Islamic state has been really properly formed in Afghanistan and or parts of Pakistan according to the IS methodology? And from that base, all of these external operations, expeditionary operations, are really starting to heat up. And we see all of our regional allies and partners increasingly threatened by a true form of the Islamic state. Are we prepared for that are we thinking about that contingency so i think you should those things are real considerations for policy makers for researchers and for those who are still involved in this fight. Yes so you know from my humble foxhole here put my professor head on the war college and speak in terms of sort of the concepts and doctrine that ought to inform these counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations and what

that means for policymakers' considerations. I think at this point, with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the renewal of great power competition, we're in an inflection point for what we want our military to do. And maybe that's a stroke of the obvious. But when you take a look at our war fighting concepts, the real tension I see right now, and I have a lot of conversations with other sort of Ica lights and IW to include like John Nagel, who I teach with at the war college, who will be no stranger to this podcast. He wrote the book famously called learning to eat soup with a knife on counterinsurgency

doctrine has been really instrumental in understanding this approach for the last 20 years or so, is this tension between preparing for the possibility of great power war with China or Russia, the pacing threat, versus the likelihood that we're going to continue to do everything we've been doing for the last 20 or so years. And so the question becomes, how do we not throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of soft competencies and capabilities. In other words, how do we optimize soft to do great power competition concomitant to all the other irregular warfare missions, operations that we've asked them to do? In fact, they are doing currently.

And this is not easy. It's a wicked sort of challenge. In fact, it's the stuff of what we train our senior colonels on who are gonna lead our formations in the joint force going forward. And I think one way that we can tie this Gordian knot is to focus on emerging capabilities technologies like artificial intelligence

and remote warfare capabilities that allow for some division of labor and capitalizing on limited resources for IW purposes concurrent to trying to prepare for deter the potential for a great power conflict. That's at the level of like the National Security Council when we start talking about policy and trade-offs for different courses of action. But I think we have to retain the capability to target the Islamic State and attempt to capitalize on these capabilities to do stuff in the context of a great power conflict. It's not either war. We can do these things simultaneously and in sequence as well. That's kind of my humble opinion on this.

Such a salient and often unheard point, I think, Paul. Thank you so much for that. So our final question to wrap us up here, send us home. Again, this is a question for both of you, but we'll go to Paul first. How can the US with its allies address the challenges of mitigating the threat of non-state actors that operate in states outside of US access like ISK in Afghanistan? Paul Afghanistan. So I may take this in two ways. First is sort of at a broad policy level, some considerations. And then the final point here, because we're talking about ISK, is what this means for counterterrorism strategy going forward. So in terms of policy, I think that we need to do another what we call IPB, intelligence

preparation of the battlefield, a broad strategic assessment of key terrain globally. I think that the driving force here, in fact, could be JSAO, the Joint Special Operations University that's within US Special Operations Command. The former president, a guy by the name of Colonel retired Dr. Isaiah Wilson, really sketched out for General Fenton, an understanding of key terrain internationally and globally, what he called the strategic heights that are historically recurring. That when you focus on these certain areas, think the Straits of Malacca,

think even the Philippines and Southeast Asia, when you focus on these areas to deploy limited intelligence and personnel capabilities will allow you some oversight and responsiveness for these emerging threats. Now, as it relates to ISK, and just briefly, I think we have to take another look at our counterterrorism strategy, given the policy strategy mismatch that we have. And I've written about sort of a three-pronged approach, which consists of attacking the depth and breadth of the organization, which would be difficult now, given how out of position we are. But nevertheless, attacking upon multiple fronts creates multiple vulnerabilities and dilemmas that you can exploit to mitigate against external operations.

We have to reconsider as well, and I hate to say this because there's a lot of moral baggage here, but we have to reconsider this non-recognition policy of the Taliban. I'm not saying sort of de jure recognition of the Taliban, but there are things you can do at the track 1.5 or 2 level through international sort of forms and dialogues that would allow us to pursue a mutual interest of disrupting, degrading, defeating ISK by way of the Taliban. One thing that we didn't talk about as much, if you want to talk about low cost, high impact messaging, strategic messaging against this organization and being more competitive in environments where they are operating. And that's not always in social media, in things that are

easier to kind of get into and to message through. Sometimes that's on radio wave, that's through local media to have a competitive local media environment that is working against ISIS-K. I think this is something that started a little bit back in the bigger years of ISIS-K, back if you want to call them that, 2017, 16, 18, when they had a formal radio broadcast and were out there on airwaves. That was something that we had to grapple with. Having messengers and being competitive against ISIS-K

at a really local level. So again, not just on the transnational side, but where are they, who are they targeting? And are we being competitive in those spaces? So thinking a bit more and setting ourselves up for success down the road with how we message both against the narratives that they're pushing out, but also what is it that we're pushing out?

Are we being proactive in how we're thinking about responding to this organization? And then preparing for strategic shocks. We've spoken about some of them, but if something does happen, another serious attack, like a Moscow, but here in the Oman, are we preparing and doing scenario planning for what the US public would demand?

What another ally public would demand, what another ally public would demand, and what kind of stress that would induce on the system. Are we prepared for that? So what can we do to counter a lot of that networked approach to ISK? It is trying to do right now that it is continuously revisiting, trying to form new alliances, going back to old ones. So what are we doing in that space too? So I think that's one thing that we should definitely explore as well. Andrew, Paul, thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. I think our audience is going to love this fascinating deep dive on ISK in Afghanistan and some of the larger big picture implications you talked about. Thanks for having us. Really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, same here. I really enjoyed the conversation, sharing some research, and then more importantly,

identifying some research questions going forward that will have some serious implications for policy and strategy. So appreciate both of you guys. Thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Our next episode will feature the Defense Innovation Unit and its efforts to leverage Silicon Valley to transform the modern battlefield. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers,

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