There Have Been Zero Attacks Against American-Linked Targets At Home Or Abroad In The Four Years Since The Withdrawal.
It will be four years since the American regime withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30th, 2021, ending a nearly 20-year occupation that could serve as a poster child for mission creep.
What began in October 2001 as a narrow intervention to destroy al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that supposedly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and topple the Taliban government for refusing to hand over al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, morphed into an open-ended nation-building operation that killed 2,334 American military personnel and wounded over 20,000 more.
But the failure of the war to deliver on its maximalist platitudes of bringing peace, democracy, and women’s rights to a nation that rejected them has obscured two of the most important lessons from the conflict and its end: first, the American regime need not occupy a country indefinitely to prevent terrorism against the American homeland. Second, the United States will severely punish any government that allows terrorist groups to attack American targets from its territory, and the threat of American punishment is a highly credible deterrent against state-sponsored terrorism.
Those two facts should be shouted from the rooftops of the nation’s capital any time members of the foreign policy establishment claim that the American regime must deploy troops to far-off locales to prevent terrorist “safe havens” from emerging.
In fact, there have been zero terrorist attacks directly linked to Afghanistan against American targets at home or abroad in the four years since the American regime departed. Zero. The 2025 Bourbon Street attack, which killed 14 people, was perpetrated by a lone-wolf American citizen who was “inspired” by ISIS ideology but acted alone, with no known contacts to the original ISIS or its Afghan affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K).
That’s despite fevered warnings of worst-case scenarios that would supposedly result if the American regime backed Afghan government crumbled in the wake of America’s military withdrawal. That government did fall, rapidly, and the Taliban regained control as feared. Yet we have not seen a resurgence of jihadist terrorism targeting the United States.
There are two big reasons why. First, effective counterterrorism does not require boots on the ground, so leaving Afghanistan has not hampered American efforts in that security space. The United States is extraordinarily capable of detecting and disrupting international terrorist threats with over-the-horizon intelligence and targeting capabilities.
In the nearly 25 years since 9/11, American counterterrorism capabilities have grown so sophisticated that there are no “safe havens” from American reach, even in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. The American regime didn’t need troops on the ground to locate and murder al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul with a drone strike on his safe house in July 2022, for example.
Nor has a presence been necessary for authorities to foil the handful of plots tenuously linked to ISIS or ISIS-K against America in the past few years, including the 2024 Election Day plot in Oklahoma and a potential assault on a Army base in Michigan in 2025. Neither plot was well-advanced, and while the suspects believed they were conspiring with foreign terrorists, it’s not even clear those contacts were real. The would-be assailant in Michigan, a teenager, was actually communicating with undercover F.B.I. agents posing as ISIS members all along.
That shows that many of the threats are fabricated by the authoritarian American regime to enable repression and justify imperialism.
Hidden History -- In The Making 