
Biden promised ISIS-K will 'pay.' Having no US troops in Afghanistan makes that harder
CNN
As the Biden administration grapples with the challenge of carrying out counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan without US boots on the ground, CNN has learned new details about last Sunday's drone strike on suspected ISIS-K fighters in Kabul that some officials say provide insight into the obstacles ahead for military and intelligence officials tasked with fulfilling President Joe Biden's promise to make the terror group "pay" for its deadly suicide attack in Kabul.
The US relied in part on overhead surveillance imagery to target the suspected ISIS-K fighters, according to two US officials. The imagery showed the suspected ISIS-K fighters loading explosives into the trunk of a car, the officials told CNN. Intelligence assets tracked the vehicle for an extended period of time and saw it stop at multiple suspected ISIS-K locations, according to a third official, and by the time of the strike, the Pentagon had amassed enough other evidence to believe that the vehicle was headed for Hamid Karzai International Airport to launch an attack.
President Donald Trump’s allies in the Republican Party and his Make America Great Again movement — even some who previously warned against wading into new foreign conflicts — largely rallied behind his actions in Venezuela on Saturday, hours after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro in a large-scale military operation.

More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.











