Local militia have been rallying around Afghan security forces since the withdrawal of Western forces. COURTESY
Western intelligence chiefs are worried. They have good reason to be. The hurried departure this month of the remaining Western forces from Afghanistan, decreed by US President Joe Biden, has emboldened Taliban insurgents.
In recent days they have seized one district after another, overrunning bases where demoralised government troops have often surrendered or fled.
Now, say observers, the spectre of international terrorism is making an unwelcome return.
"The Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan makes a Taliban takeover inevitable and gives al-Qaeda the opportunity to rebuild its network, to the point where it could once again plot attacks around the world," Dr Sajjan Gohel, a security and terrorism analyst, told the BBC.
Expanding operations
That is certainly at the more pessimistic end of the spectrum but two things are certain here. Firstly, the Taliban - the hardline Islamists who ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001 with a rod of iron - are coming back in some form.
For now, they say they have no ambition to take Kabul, the capital, by force. But in large parts of the country they are already the dominant force and they have never dropped their demand to make the country an Islamic Emirate according to their own strict guidelines.
Secondly, al-Qaeda and its rival, the Islamic State in Khurasan Province (IS-KP), will be looking to profit from the departure of Western forces to expand their operations in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda and IS are already in Afghanistan. The country is simply too mountainous, the terrain too rugged, for there not to be numerous remote hiding places for these internationally proscribed terror groups to hide away in.
But up until now the Afghan government intelligence service, the NDS, working closely with US and other special forces, has been able to partly contain the threat.
Attacks and bombings have still taken place, but on countless occasions that we rarely hear about in public, tipoffs by human informants or an intercepted mobile phone call have resulted in swift and effective action by Afghan and Western special forces.
Operating from bases inside Afghanistan, they have often been able to react within minutes, landing by helicopter, sometime in the dead of night, catching their enemy by surprise.
That is now coming to an end.
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