The Trump Administration released its 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy in May of this year. Parts of it are serious work. It correctly identifies ISIS-Khorasan and al-Qaeda as threats capable of striking the American homeland. It makes a reasonable case for treating hemispheric cartel networks as a first-tier priority. It acknowledges Iran as the central state sponsor of regional terrorism. On the core mechanics of counterterrorism, targeting, partner force development, and WMD prevention, it holds up.
But it does not minimize Afghanistan. It does not deprioritize it. It leaves it out entirely. A 16-page counterterrorism strategy that names ISIS-Khorasan as a top-tier threat to the United States does not contain a single substantive reference to the country where ISIS-K is based, where it recruits, where it trains, and from which it has planned attacks that reached as far as Moscow and Vienna. That country is Afghanistan. And it is simply not in this document. This is not a minor oversight. It is the central failure of the strategy.
ISIS-K did not appear out of nowhere. It grew out of a specific political environment: the collapse of the Afghan Republic, the Taliban's return to power, and the ungoverned spaces that followed. The Taliban are not a peripheral detail in this picture. They govern the country where the named priority threat lives and operates. The 2026 strategy does not mention them once.
This matters beyond the analytical level. The Taliban are actively fighting ISIS-K on the ground inside Afghanistan right now. Whatever one thinks of Taliban governance or their complicated relationship with al-Qaeda, the operational reality is straightforward: the only force physically engaged with America's named top-tier Islamist threat is a government that the United States has no formal counterterrorism framework with and no apparent strategic posture toward. The 2026 CT Strategy offers no answer to that contradiction because it does not acknowledge the contradiction exists.
The omission of Pakistan makes it worse. Al-Qaeda did not build its operational capacity in a vacuum. For 25 years, elements of Pakistan's security apparatus provided strategic cover, safe harbor, and direct support to the Taliban and al-Qaeda affiliates who were openly committed to attacking the United States. Osama bin Laden was not found in a remote cave. He was found in a garrison town an hour from Islamabad. The Taliban's Quetta Shura operated openly on Pakistani soil for the entire duration of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. These are not allegations. They are documented facts that successive American administrations acknowledged privately and declined to confront publicly.
The 2026 CT Strategy carries on that tradition. Pakistan is not mentioned once.
A counterterrorism strategy that treats al-Qaeda as an existential threat while saying nothing about the state that sheltered and sustained it for a quarter century is not a serious strategic document. It is a document that has made a deliberate political choice to leave the most important regional variable off the page. That choice has a long history. And that history has consequences that Afghans have paid in full.
What makes Pakistan's omission even harder to defend in 2026 is what Pakistan is doing right now. It is conducting airstrikes on Afghan territory, killing Afghan civilians under the banner of counterterrorism operations against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Those strikes are destabilizing border communities, driving displacement, and generating exactly the kind of grievance environment that terrorist organizations depend on for recruitment. A U.S. counterterrorism strategy released in the middle of all this that says nothing about Pakistan's conduct on Afghan soil is not neutral. It is permissive.
I spent years inside Afghanistan's security institutions, including at the Ministry of Interior, working to build the kind of institutional framework that could make the country governable. I watched what that work required, what it was denied, and what eventually happened when the international community decided the job was done before the foundation was ever actually solid. I am not writing this to defend any Afghan government, past or present. I am writing it as someone who has a precise sense of what it costs when the United States produces counterterrorism frameworks that name Afghan-origin threats while treating Afghanistan itself as optional.
The 2026 CT Strategy will not accomplish what it sets out to accomplish on ISIS-K or al-Qaeda so long as it refuses to honestly engage with the governance reality in Afghanistan and the behavior of Pakistan that together define the operating environment for both groups. Naming a threat is not a strategy. Identifying a target while ignoring the ground that shelters it is not a plan. It is a posture. And the United States has been holding that posture, at enormous cost, for twenty-five years.
The Administration should address this directly. A formal annex or addendum covering Afghanistan and Pakistan is not optional if the strategy's stated goals are to mean anything. The alternative is another round of frameworks that get the threat right, get the geography wrong, and then act surprised when the outcome is the same as every time before.
