Nine years after a U.S.-led invasion routed almost all of al Qaeda's surviving militants in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden's network is gradually returning.
Over the past six to eight months, al Qaeda has begun setting up training camps, hideouts and operations bases in the remote mountains along Afghanistan's northeastern border with Pakistan, some U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials say. The stepped-up infiltration followed a U.S. pullback from large swatches of the region starting 18 months ago. The areas were deemed strategically irrelevant and left to Afghanistan's uneven security forces, and in some parts, abandoned entirely.
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Apart from al Qaeda and the Taliban, two of the most potent Pakistani militant groups have a significant presence in KunarJaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. There's also the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, as the Pakistan Taliban are known, and the two other main Afghan insurgent factions, the Haqqani network and Hezb-e-Islami. Rounding out the scene is a smattering of militants from Central Asia, Chechnya and beyond.
Some of the valleys in Kunar "look like what we"the U.S. and President Hamid Karzai's government"are trying to keep Afghanistan from becoming," said Rangin Dafdar Spanta, Afghanistan's pro-Western national security adviser.
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The problem, say officials, is that JSOC, (Joint Special Operations Command,) with a global counterterrorism mission that gives it responsibility for strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and other trouble spots, is already stretched thin. Relying on it to police Afghanistan's hinterlands as American forces pull out may be unrealistic,.........
