Did the U.S. support the growth of ISIS-K in Afghanistan? Possible answers to that question are examined by independent journalist Alex Rubinstein in an Aug. 30 analysis published by MintPress News. Rubinstein begins by observing that the list of those who have been accusing the U.S. of supporting ISIS-K is quite expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit, and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who recently called the group a “tool” of the United States.
Rubinstein writes that mass-casualty terrorist attacks are repeatedly used as justification by the United States for continuing its occupations of foreign countries. “The strongest argument in favor of a U.S. withdrawal put forward by the Biden Administration is that the United States completed its counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan,” Rubinstein writes. “The attack by ‘ISIS-K’ on the Kabul airport collapses this argument, and so it benefits those who would prefer to see Afghanistan permanently occupied by the U.S.”
Rubinstein writes that the available evidence related to the authorship of the Aug. 26 suicide attack at the Kabul airport leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The evidence includes, among other things, the interview with “a senior ISIS-K commander” taped by CNN two weeks before the attack, in which he claimed that the organization was lying low and focusing on recruiting rather than attacking the U.S. military during its withdrawal.
