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DEEP DIVE – It’s the opening act in a potential public health nightmare: a chicken dies on a farm, for no apparent reason; another perishes at a farm hundreds of miles away; it takes time for the farm owners to notice, more time for tests to be conducted and different anomalies connected, and before the diagnostics are complete, the damage is done – the first wave of a bird flu pandemic has broken.
Beyond natural outbreaks, there are also concerns involving deliberate acts: This week the Department of Justice charged three Chinese nationals with smuggling biological materials into the U.S.; and in June two Chinese researchers were charged with trying to smuggle a fungus into the U.S. that can devastate grain crops.
Some experts are imagining a world in which technology is harnessed to ensure that such biosecurity nightmares don’t happen – or are dealt with much faster and more effectively.
“What we're promoting is a system that can look at things more holistically and on a much larger scale,” Robert Norton, a professor of veterinary infectious diseases and coordinator of national security and defense projects at Auburn University, told The Cipher Brief. “The system is designed to fill gaps in biosurveillance, looking for disease outbreaks, whether they be naturally occurring or induced through bioterrorism.”
That proposed system has a name – BISR, for Biosurveillance Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – and its backers believe it would revolutionize the field of biosurveillance. The core concept is that sophisticated sensors and other tools used by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) can be leveraged to improve detection, and that artificial intelligence can be deployed to help fast-track diagnosis. The chicken-farm example is only one scenario; responses to a COVID-19-like outbreak or acts of bioterrorism would be improved as well.
Norton, Daniel Gerstein, a senior policy researcher at RAND,and Cris Young, professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Auburn, co-authored an article last year arguing that the creation of a BISR system was “a national security imperative at the crossroads of technology, public health, and intelligence.” The BISR, they wrote, “would be designed to address two mission-critical requirements for biosurveillance: rapid detection and predictive analysis.”
They have taken their plans to Capitol Hill – specifically, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where they say they have received “good reviews.” The Select Committee wouldn’t comment on the BISR proposal itself but in a statement to The Cipher Brief, a spokesperson said that “The Committee continues to explore various biosecurity initiatives and programs to ensure that the U.S. is postured sufficiently to combat and prevent any future biosecurity threats that could cause widespread harm.” The statement went on to say that the Committee is working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “to establish an Office of Intelligence within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to address threats to U.S. agriculture.”
The threats are clear, to agriculture and beyond. The U.S. remains vulnerable to biologically driven disruption – be it from another COVID-like pandemic, an outbreak of bird flu that reaches humans, or bioterrorism. Anxiety over the latter has grown as experts worry that AI may be used to create dangerous biological pathogens.
At last year’s Cipher Brief Threat Conference, Jennifer Ewbank, a former CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation, warned of “the application of AI in biological weapons by unsavory actors.” And a 2024 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that the same AI capabilities that might produce medical breakthroughs could – inadvertently or otherwise – lead to the creation of deadly pathogens. AI models may “accelerate or simplify the reintroduction of dangerous extinct viruses or dangerous viruses that only exist now within research labs,” the report found.
How prepared is the U.S. to counter such threats? And might a technology-driven “BISR” system revolutionize biosurveillance, as its backers contend?
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How a “BISR” might work
The crux of the case for a BISR system is twofold: first, that an array of sophisticated data-gathering tools – drones, satellites, hyperspectral sensors and others – can be mobilized to track biosecurity anomalies; and that trained AI models would analyze the data that the system collected. The system’s architects envision a BISR “dashboard” that provides first responders and decision makers in government, the military and business near-real time insight and analysis.
It’s a high-tech effort to gather clues – a change in a community’s waste water, a spike in the sales of certain medications, even the breathing or social behavior of animals – and assess their meaning more rapidly than current systems allow.
“Our system is agnostic,” Norton said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a natural disease outbreak or a terrorism event, it’s looking for those changes and then being able to rapidly detect them and rapidly alert the individuals that are responsible.”
To expand on the chicken-farm scenario: at the moment, one animal’s death might lead a farm worker to call the company veterinarian, the veterinarian would take samples, the farm would look at the flock as a whole, and samples would be brought to laboratories for tests. Ultimately the case might go to a national lab to determine whether avian influenza or another condition was present.
Public health officials say the current system works – but can be slow. Advocates for the BISR system say it would at minimum improve the speed of response, gaining valuable time to determine not only whether a virus was present, but also how it might be circulating in the broader environment. Sensors in and around the poultry houses would track not only a dead chicken, but also the emissions and even behavioral anomalies within the flock – “pattern-of-life” behavior, as the experts say. Any anomaly would be flagged and the system “tipped off,” as Auburn’s Cris Young put it, to alert sensors on other farms.
“The sensors would tip and cue other sensors that would then take a larger look at the larger area or even a state,” Young told The Cipher Brief, “to determine if those signatures coming off of that one particular house that's affected are similar to things happening in other houses.”
Given the sheer volume of data generated by a BISR system, AI models would be used to rapidly assess the data – and check anomalies against specific pathogens.
BISR’s proponents say a similar approach could be taken with viruses among humans, providing more rapid early-warning mechanisms and analysis.
“Advances in sensor capabilities, coupled with the use of AI platforms, provide new capabilities that could be applied to the detection of biological events in the early stages of an outbreak,” the authors of the BISR article wrote. “The concept would provide new tools for early detection, response, mitigations, and ultimately, recovery from an outbreak.”
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The tools of a BISR system
The system’s architects say most of its high-tech elements already exist – sensors in place on poultry farms or in public spaces, and various tools of ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) that are currently used across the IC. These might include multispectral and hyperspectral sensors, and many airborne assets – balloons, drones, aircraft and satellites – that have been used to detect concentrations of gases for national security purposes. The International Space Station, for instance, regularly uses hyperspectral imaging to map the earth’s surface, and the Department of Defense uses hyperspectral imaging for several purposes – including detection of chemical and biological hazards.
Norton cited the example of the IC’s use of satellite imagery to monitor concentrations of nitrate in Afghanistan – because high levels of nitrate often indicated the presence of bomb-making facilities. Nitrate is also a component found in animal waste – and so in the public health example, he said, satellite imagery could be used to monitor levels of nitrate and other compounds on a farm.
Ultimately, BISR’s proponents believe the system could also be used to monitor the volatilome (essentially, what humans and animals breathe out) of people at airports or stadiums or other crowded environments, and alert public health officials about anomalies in the data. Young described a scenario in which international arrivals at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport – the nation’s busiest – would be watched by hyperspectral sensors to detect anomalies in respiration.
“We might have sensors set up in multiple places as [people] disembark from their flight,” Young said. “There might be several places to take a different scan with multiple sensors, and we might be able to say with some certainty, this person is infected with let's say COVID, and this person is actually shedding the virus.”
The hope is that any anomaly – be it on a chicken farm or at a crowded airport – would tip the system to sweep up other relevant information: Have ER visits spiked in a community? Does social media from that community suggest related anomalies? And so forth. Ideally, a dangerous pathogen would be flagged and identified before it leads to a pandemic, or an act of bioterror would be detected at the earliest possible moment.
Michael Gates, CEO of GDX Development, a company that bills itself as “solving very complex national security challenges,” says he joined the BISR effort “from the technology side of the equation.” GDX has worked previously with the U.S. Special Operations Command. Gates says the key to BISR’s success will involve “sensor fusion” – the linking of a range of data-gathering mechanisms.
“If you think about the world of the Internet of Things, everything's a sensor, and there's not very many systems out there that have the ability to collect off of all of those sensors, bring that data payload in, and then push it into a single pane of glass that can be used for military operations, for intelligence sharing or more tactical things,” Gates told The Cipher Brief.
In the chicken farm example, Gates envisions “sensor fusion” ranging from a hyperspectral scan to “available drone assets” and ultimately “zeroing in down to sensors such as temperature, air purification, even cameras monitoring chicken behaviors.”
Once a problem has been identified, Gates said, “you can use open-source intelligence and other things to mine, let's say, a Reddit form for these things – is anybody talking on the internet about their chicken coops having issues? – and so on, for whatever the issue is.”
“There's already enough sensors out there,” he added. “The data is there. What's happening is that information's not being shared. It's not being centralized, meaning we're getting delayed responses...Nobody has a holistic picture right now on biosurveillance.”
In the early stages of a crisis, the BISR might do a lot of work before humans are engaged, though the Auburn professors stress that the system aims only to provide experts a head start, rather than cut them out of the proverbial “loop.”
“We support human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence systems,” Young said. “We want there to be a person that has to look at this screen at some point and say, okay, I understand what's going on here. Maybe that happens within minutes of an anomaly occurring, but regardless, at some point a person needs to decide, Yes, that's what this is, or No, we need further information.”
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The challenges
Norton and Young say they have presented their plans to the House Select Committee and are prepared to do the same to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). They believe their system can be 80 percent complete in three years and fully functional in five. As for costs, they say the first two years would require a budget of $10 million, and that the system’s operating costs would eventually be $300 million annually. They argue that billions of dollars have been spent in the biosurveillance domain, and that the BISR would be a major upgrade over existing capabilities.
It may sound like a no-brainer – the smart use of technology to guard against myriad biosecurity threats – but questions abound about BISR and its future. And many of the hurdles to its implementation involve, in one way or another, the human element.
Just as the Intelligence Community has struggled at times to share information and assess national security risks, the government architecture in biosurveillance is complex and often siloed. A host of agencies share responsibility for the nation’s biosecurity – the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), to name a few. Experts say they don’t always communicate effectively with one another – and that states don’t always share critical information effectively with the federal government.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, noted that in the most recent bird flu outbreak in the U.S., some states wanted to handle the information and response without involving the federal government.
“They weren't even very interested in USDA at times,” Inglesby told The Cipher Brief. “So they said, we'll handle this on our own and we'll let you know. Meanwhile, CDC has to wait for states to bring them the data and information. They don't have command authority to say you must deliver it. It's a voluntary basis.”
Norton says the BISR developers are hoping to partner with one “Mother Ship” agency within the IC – he wouldn’t say which one – because the IC controls the government’s most sophisticated satellites and other data-gathering systems. He also said that while the system involves high-tech elements and the building of the BISR “dashboard,” technology isn’t the primary hurdle.
“Biosurveillance is not a technology problem, but rather a permissions and authorities problem,” Norton said. That might involve permission to use a Pentagon satellite for biosecurity purposes, he said, or agreement from a major industrial farm to share its data or house sensors on its property.
Inglesby said that transparency and information-sharing would be critical for a BISR-like system to work – and that in the case of the chicken farm example, key stakeholders might be unwilling to cede control of the analytical process to a BISR “dashboard.”
“You have the farm owner who will want to make his or her own assessment, you have local government that may not want outsiders coming in and making a determination for them, and you might have unwillingness even at the federal level to do this,” Inglesby said. “You’re going to need an across-the-board buy-in that we haven’t always seen.”
There are also questions about technical implementation. In the Atlanta airport example, Norton acknowledged that even a highly sophisticated hyperspectral sensor wouldn’t be able to detect, say, COVID-19, unless passengers were directed to a discrete area close to the sensors – and here again, permissions would be needed to install such sensors. The post-COVID atmosphere has suggested less public appetite in the U.S. for intrusive screening, not more. The House Select Committee, in its statement to The Cipher Brief, included a reference to “ensuring any proposal balances privacy and the need to avoid the abuses of the COVID-19 period.”
Inglesby also stressed the importance of transparency on the global stage when it comes to public health crises. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China failed to share the detailed casework of its first 500 patients in the “ground-zero” city of Wuhan – and more than five years later, it still hasn’t done so.
“In Wuhan, the data was very available, there were a lot of people dying, but the data was covered up,” Inglesby said. “And so even if you had installed the most sophisticated systems, if they're being run by people who don't want to share that information, it's not going to change anything.”
Some early-warning biosurveillance systems are already in place, in the world of what’s known as “Syndromic Surveillance” – and experts say many have worked well.
The CDC’s BioSense platform gathers health-related data from hospitals and clinics to detect potential outbreaks or bioterrorism events. As a part of BioSense, "Sentinel Alerts" are generated when reports involve high-concern viruses or diseases. In the case of influenza (the human variant), alerts are triggered when more than 3 % of ER visits are for the flu. Globally, satellites have been used to track dengue fever outbreaks by measuring water levels in the jungle. And wastewater surveillance systems exist to check on levels of bacteria or viruses.
A less positive precedent is the BioWatch program, which was created by DHS in 2001 and billed as "the nation's first early warning network of sensors to detect biological attack." The system tracks the air supply using Environmental Protection Agency air filters, and sends information to the CDC and – if warranted, to the FBI. The system has been blamed for generating dozens of false positives, and in an audit reported by the Associated Press in 2021, BioWatch was said to have failed in detecting known threats.
Norton told The Cipher Brief that today’s technologies are sophisticated enough to ensure that BISR would operate at a higher level than BioWatch. He added that rigorous standards in the AI models would “prevent AI hallucinations” that could cause false positives – or worse, false negatives.
And Inglesby was quick to note that any improvements in early warning and diagnostics would be welcome.
“There is no single system in the country, and people have been talking about building stronger biosurveillance for a long time,” he said. “Anything you can get done in this space would be super-valuable, assuming the costs aren’t prohibitive and you get the buy-in to use this information wisely.”
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A group of Al Qaeda-linked militants are reportedly on the cusp of seizing control of the West African nation of Mali in what many fear could lead to a complete takeover of a national government by a designated terrorist organization.
Even by the sorry standards of Sudanese history, the recent atrocities committed by various factions in what seems like an endless civil war stand out. In the last three weeks or so, the levels of killing and sheer cruelty have shocked aid agencies and the international community.
Recent Developments 1) Capture of al-Fashir (el-Fasher) and mass killings in North Darfur — late October 2025
DEEP DIVE — On the night of June 20, 2025, the Nigerien village of Manda became the stage for one of the deadliest massacres in the Sahel in recent memory. As dozens of worshippers gathered at a mosque for evening prayers, militants from the Islamic State’s Sahel Province encircled the village and opened fire without pause. Bullets tore through the congregation,killing at least 71 men, women, and children and wounding dozens more.
Survivors later recalled the horror of lying motionless beneath the bodies of neighbors and relatives to avoid being shot, while houses were torched and families scattered in the chaos. The bloodshed was not only an assault on a remote community in Tillabéri, but a stark signal of how deeply jihadist violence has penetrated this once quiet borderland.
In the span of a few hours, Manda joined the growing list of towns and villages reduced to symbols of terror, underscoring the reality that groups like Islamic State in the Sahel now operate less as rogue insurgents than as entrenched power brokers whose reach stretches across Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. For the United States, the massacre is more than a humanitarian catastrophe — it is a sobering reminder that the doctrine of forward defense faces its most formidable test yet in Africa’s most fragile frontier.
“The threat from Sahelian jihadists is really two-fold,” Caleb Weiss, editor of FDD’s Long War Journal, tells The Cipher Brief. “They are destabilizing wider West Africa, particularly the Gulf of Guinea states, which have been firm U.S. and Western allies. And secondly, there is worry about European security if jihadis in the Sahel are allowed to operate freely. The Sahel can become a base of operations from which to launch or even sponsor attacks into continental Europe.”
Hans-Jakob Schindler, Senior Director of the Counter Extremism Project, frames the problem in similarly stark terms.
“There are two primary terrorist threats that can be identified,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “First of all, the rapid expansion of the al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM as well as the ISIS affiliates ISSP and ISWAP in the Sahel region has destabilized several countries, in particular Burkina Faso, Mali and to a growing extent also Niger, with continuing serious security problems in the North of Nigeria.”
From Margins to Mainstream: The Rise of Sahelian Jihadism
The massacre in Mandareflects a decade-long unraveling of state control. Thecollapse of Libya in 2011 unleashed vast armories and fighters into the desert, reigniting dormant rebellions and enabling extremist groups to entrench themselves in northern Mali. The Malian state itself fragmented in 2012 following a coup, allowing jihadist coalitions to seize major northern cities.
Over time, groupssplintered and reformed. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate, emerged in 2017, while the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) evolved into the Islamic State’s Sahel Province. These factions began imposing taxes, adjudicating disputes, and governing their respective territories. According to Vision of Humanity, the Sahelaccounted for 51 percent of global terrorism deaths in 2024, with nearly 25,000 conflict-related fatalities — a neartenfold increase since 2019.
Liam Carnes-Douglas of the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC) says the rise reflects more than battlefield victories.
“Some of the most urgent threats posed by Sahel-based jihadist groups stem from the destabilization of key regional partners,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “Once among the strongest U.S. allies in counterterrorism, these governments have shifted rapidly from fragile democracies to military juntas, fueled in part by the failures of Western-backed security initiatives. That has sidelined the United States as anti-Western sentiment grows.”
Andrew Lewis, president of the operational intelligence firm Ulysses Group, agrees that the power vacuum extends beyond the battlefield.
“In the truest sense, the U.S. has limited national security interests in the region. But we do have resource and energy interests that underpin our national security strategy — particularly in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “The control of trade routes, ports, and export conduits of critical minerals is a strategic concern. We would like to see JNIM, ISIS, and their affiliates contained before they threaten those supply chains.”
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Tactical Adaptation and Regional Spillover
Over the last eighteen months, jihadist groups in the Sahel have evolved their tactics in ways that suggest a larger ambition. Motorcycles enable lightning raids across ungoverned stretches. Drone warfare — once limited to surveillance — has evolved into an offensive capability. JNIM has carried out more than 30 confirmed drone strikessince late 2023.
“Both al-Qaeda’s JNIM and the Islamic State’s Sahel Province have deployed suicide drones,” Weiss noted. “They’re also utilizing Starlink to stay connected in remote areas. Helping counter drones, exploiting Starlink’s vulnerabilities, and shutting off externally sourced financing would help the region tremendously.”
Carnes-Douglas also warns that “rapid technological advancements are increasingly shaping warfare.”
“Drones and Starlink-enabled communications stand out as particularly transformative, yet both regional security forces and U.S. capabilities lag significantly behind,” he continued, pointing out that lessons from Ukraine “demonstrate how these technologies are quickly adapted for combat,” and their proliferation “signals that warfare in the Sahel is entering a transitional, high-tech phase.”
Schindler underscores a connected, transnational risk.
“The Sahel region is also a key network hub for the international drug transportation pipeline of Hezbollah-linked drugs that are transported from South America via West Africa to Europe for sale there,” he explained. “This pipeline directly funds Hezbollah’s activities in Lebanon. Given the central role that the U.S. is playing in the current negotiations between Hezbollah and Israel, this income stream for Hezbollah will continue to ensure that this terror group will be able to continue to fund its activities both within Lebanon and beyond.”
Across Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso, militants are consolidating control.
“Islamic State in the Greater Sahara has long used the tri-border area to evade interdiction,” Carnes-Douglas explained. “That makes coordinated regional responses not just useful but necessary.”
The violence, however, is also spilling outward.
“Sahelian jihadis are now inching closer to Senegal,” Weiss said. “They’re creating a jihadist land bridge between the Sahel, littoral West Africa, and Nigeria — effectively one large area of jihadist operations encompassing a significant chunk of the continent.”
This expansion also has a sectarian dimension. Lewis surmised that more than 50,000 Christians have beenmurdered in Nigeria since 2009, “with more than 7,000killed in 2025 alone.”
“It’s difficult to assess the true scale of persecution Islamist militant groups are carrying out,” he underscored. “But it’s happening.”
Schindler also highlights an alarming operational trend: “Currently they are not only able to conduct multi-layered attacks against single targets (such as a military camp) but also to conduct simultaneous and coordinated attacks on multiple targets across relatively large geographic areas.”
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U.S. Policy Today: A Detachment Problem?
For years, the U.S.viewed the Sahel as a key front in counterterrorism, maintaining drone bases and training missions in Niger. But the 2023 coup upended that equation. Washington froze over $500 million in aid and limited cooperation even as the juntaexpanded ties with Russia’s Wagner Group. The result is a fragile balance between limited engagement and strategic erosion.
“Outside of JSOC, U.S. efforts in the region have been marginal at best. That’s evident in the surge in violence and the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States, which pivoted away from the West to Russia,” Lewis said. “None of our 333 programs in the region has dented terror operations. We rely heavily on intelligence-led frameworks but have very little real-time intelligence since withdrawing key assets from Niger.”
Carnes-Douglas echoes that concern. “American counterterrorism efforts have achieved tactical successes but strategic failures,” he observed. “Short-term gains from drone strikes or training are constantly undermined by state fragility, coups, and shifting alliances.”
Moreover, while France’s drawdown from Operation Barkhane — the 2014–2022 French-led counterterrorism campaign across the Sahel that deployed more than 5,000 troops to combat Islamist insurgencies in Mali, Niger, and Chad — created a vacuum, “the U.S. has not yet developed a sustainable replacement strategy,” Weiss stressed. “There are some indications the U.S. has resumed limited intel support to Sahelian juntas, but nothing that matches previous levels of engagement,” he continued.
Schindler argues that the disengagement itself has worsened the crisis.
“Although a lot of criticism has been levied against the UN, EU and US counter terrorism operations in West Africa and the Sahel in the past, the current situation, in which the UN, the EU and the US have largely disengaged from the region clearly demonstrates that overall, the counterterrorism efforts had been successful in stemming the tide of terrorist expansion in the region,” he said.
A Strategic Imperative: What Must Washington Do Next
Analysts emphasize that the path forward requires reimagining engagement. Weiss argues that U.S. support should focus on technology denial and intelligence integration, not just kinetic strikes.
“Helping counter drones, exploiting the use of Starlink and the data vulnerabilities therein, and helping to shut off externally sourced financing would help the region tremendously,” he said.
Washington, Lewis highlighted, must also think pragmatically about force posture.
“If we want to contain JNIM and ISIS, the focus should be on protecting the coastal regions with ISR and targeted strikes where success is measured by territory denied, not by how many host forces we train,” he said. “But that requires basing rights, logistics, and political will, and China and Russia hold significant leverage over potential host countries.”
Indeed, Beijing’s influence looms large.
“China has financed major ports, railways, and industrial projects across Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Senegal,” Lewis explained, noting that this gives it immense leverage to counter U.S. influence and deny access to infrastructure critical for forward operations.
Carnes-Douglas, meanwhile, advocates for a recalibrated diplomacy that acknowledges political realities.
“Although U.S. foreign policy appears to be shifting away from involvement in these conflicts, Washington should recommit pragmatically to directly limit jihadist groups’ ability to threaten American interests,” he asserted. “This, in turn, would form stronger relationships with the newly formed governments and in turn could be an industrial and economic boon, as well benefiting all partners.”
Schindler proposes a containment-first approach, prioritizing direct engagement with the littoral Gulf of Guinea states.
“One primary goal should be containment, ensuring that the expansion of terrorist activities and control in the region does not affect additional countries, in particular the littoral states of the Gulf of Guinea,” he said.
The slaughter at Manda, the border ambushes, the drone blitzes — all are signs of a metastasizing threat.
“Through the increasing influence and power of these terrorist affiliates in the Sahel region, the threat to US interests in the region, as well as potentially to the US homeland, is increasing in parallel,” he added.
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DEEP DIVE — Eight weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to Mexico City, the epicenter of the global illegal drug trade, and declared, “The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations.”
Since then, the administration’s military counter-drug offensive in Latin America and the Caribbean has destroyed at least 15 small boats and killed at least 61 people – but none of them were drug kingpins or senior, irreplaceable figures in the transnational organized crime cartels that make and move fentanyl and other lethal opioids that have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“Targeting fast boat operators will not stop major drug trafficking kingpins from sending multi-ton quantities of drugs to our country and around the world,” Michael Chavarria, a former DEA supervisor who spent 26 years investigating drug cartels in Mexico, the Caribbean and the Southwest border, told The Cipher Brief. “The drug trade is the most profitable business in the world, without equal. The minions currently targeted on the high seas will continue risking their lives because kingpins pay them more than they could ever earn pursuing legal options. Now, on the high seas, they’re being extrajudicially murdered, in a campaign that will have no impact on the global drug trade.”
Like other veterans of the DEA, Chavarria suspects that if the boats blown up so far contained contraband, it was likely marijuana or cocaine, a stimulant manufactured in Colombia from coca plants grown in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Many of the small boats plying the Caribbean are believed to be supplying the European market, where cocaine brings double or triple U.S. prices. While hardly benign, cocaine is not considered a major overdose danger, and it has fallen out of fashion among many American drug users, who have increasingly turned to far riskier substances — particularly fentanyl, a synthetic opioid painkiller much stronger than heroin, and the synthetic stimulant methamphetamine. Both are manufactured mostly in Mexico, in cartel “superlabs,” with precursor chemicals imported from China and India.
“I doubt these decisions [to attack small boats] involve input from DEA leadership, who I believe serve the American public as best as resources allow,” Chavarria said. “Instead, let’s focus on the Chinese fentanyl sources responsible for threatening our citizens’ lives. The new deadly triangle is China-Mexico-United States.”
Despite objections from Congress, legal scholars and foreign governments, President Trump has announced he may soon authorize strikes inside Venezuela. Many experts believe his agenda in that country is about forcing President Nicolas Maduro out of office, rather than stopping drugs, because Venezuela is not known for producing massive quantities of illegal drugs. The U.S. government's most authoritative annual intelligence assessments – the Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment and the State Department’s International Narcotics Control StrategyReport – characterize Venezuela as a transshipment hub. Maduro himself and a number current and former Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 for conspiring with Colombia’s leftist FARC insurgents to transport cocaine produced in the guerillas’ jungle labs in Colombia.
The problem is in Mexico
The world’s richest, most powerful drug lords are Mexican citizens, with well-armed private armies, dynasties and bases of operations nestled deep in the Mexican countryside. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has absolutely ruled out the idea of American boots on Mexican soil. Will the U.S. defy her wishes by ordering American armed drones or special operations teams into Mexico to conduct unilateral commando raids? So far, Trump and his senior advisors have not signaled that such incursions are imminent – but they’ve never said never. In Ecuador two months ago, Rubio said the administration would continue to target and kill suspected traffickers without their homelands’ consent, if those countries didn’t participate in Trump’s new war on drugs by mounting their own attacks on cartels. “For cooperative governments, there’s no need because those governments are going to help us,” he said. “They’re going to help us find these people and blow them up, if that’s what it takes.”
Mexican security forces have repeatedly tried and failed to arrest El Mencho, real name Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, Mexico’s kingpin of kingpins. Oseguera is the 59-year-old founder and leader of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Mexico’s, and the world's most successful and feared organized crime enterprise. The CJNG, which emerged from the western state of Michoacán, famed for its avocados, is now a multinational billion-dollar business with a presence in nearly every state in the U.S.and at least 40 countries, according to DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment. The U.S. has put a $15 million bounty on Oseguera’s head.
“The CJNG is probably the wealthiest criminal group in the world, maybe even more than the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] in Iran,” Paul Craine, formerly DEA’s regional director for Mexico, Central America, and Canada, told The Cipher Brief. “It’s the biggest terrorist organization in the Western hemisphere. The CJNG is now right on the border, which no one ever expected. Plus, they have the U.S. infiltrated with their elements for smuggling guns, drugs and other businesses.”
Reward poster for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of “El Mencho”. (State Department)
In second place is the older, fragmented but still powerful Sinaloa cartel. Sinaloa cartel leaders Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as the Chapitos, are sons of the infamous cartel founder Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, now serving time in a U.S. prison. They are credited with creating the fentanyl craze by promoting it in their distribution systems, alongside cocaine, meth and marijuana. The U.S. is offering rewards of $10 million apiece for them.
In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Tex., who recently led the Congressional task force on cartels to Mexico to confer with Sheinbaum’s senior security officials, said he would not advise Trump to try a unilateral incursion on Mexican soil without that nation’s full agreement and active participation. Such an act would explicitly violate the two nations’ joint agreement signed last month pledging “respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Both nations promised to fight drug trafficking and other crimes “each in our own territory,” Mexican foreign secretary foreign secretary Juan Ramon de la Fuente emphasized.
To dismantle the cartels and destroy their sanctuaries in Mexico, Crenshaw, a former lieutenant commander in the Navy SEALs, and other members of Congress are pushing for a massive joint U.S.-Mexico initiative modeled on the U.S.-Colombian military-intelligence relationship in the 1990s and early 2000s. In those operations, Colombian commandos were the point of the spear, with advisors and trainers from U.S. special operations, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration working behind the scenes, providing training, communications intercepts, human intelligence, tracking technology, financial analyses and other technical assistance. As a result, in 1993, the joint effort tracked signals from a radio phone wielded by legendary Medellin cartel founder Pablo Escobar to the roof of a dingy building in downtown Medellin. A Colombian military marksman shot him dead. The rest of the Medellin cartel crumbled. By 1995, the Cali cartel had fallen. FARC guerillas soon stepped into the breach by setting up jungle labs and taking over the cocaine manufacturing business. The CIA covertly supplied U.S.-made precision-guided munitions that the Colombians used in a series of air strikes that decimated the FARC leadership. In 2016, surviving FARC guerillas made a peace accord with Bogotá and agreed to demobilize.
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What the fight would look like
Any commando team that tries to take on Mexico’s drug bosses and their large, well-armed paramilitary forces can expect ferocious resistance financed by very deep pockets. CJNG territory covers thousands of square miles in the western Mexican state of Michoacán, where Oseguera was born, and in neighboring Jalisco state. His domain is rugged countryside, dotted with ranches and laced with hidden trails, caves and mines. Oseguera has even built his own hospital, according to DEA intelligence, so he can undergo treatment for chronic kidney disease.
The Chapitos are similarly well-protected in Sinaloa state. Experts warn that a joint Mexican-U.S. special operations assault would raise the specter of possible “blue-on-blue”or “green-on-green” firefights a with corrupt elements of Mexico’s security forces defending the narco leaders. “They travel in hordes of security,” says a senior DEA agent who has investigated them for many years. “And not just hordes of security, but you're talking about a paid-off military that's protecting them, paid-off police protecting them. The corruption is just so rampant, and this is why a lot of these people can't get caught.”
“Whether you call it counterterrorism or counterinsurgency, that is what we're dealing with in Mexico,” Crenshaw told the Cipher Brief. “They use terroristic tactics. They terrorize their own people. They are an insurgency, in the sense that they're integrated into every level of society, from government to their own military, to security, to pop culture… The Mexican military has some very, very elite units that I think would be respected anywhere in the world. But there's not many of them. They need more, and additional training, additional pipelines into those elite units. Basic aircraft, ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance], close air support, things that are largely lacking. When they do go into these very dangerous areas and try to go after some of these dangerous kingpins, they're doing so without the kind of support that U.S. special operations would be used to.”
Violence on the Mexico-United States border continues to rise. Just 10 days into the month, nearly 21 homicides are recorded. On Monday, March 10, seven people are shot and killed in separate incidents. (Photo by David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The CJNG’s defenses are considered particularly militarized and formidable. According to current and former U.S. officials who have investigated the cartel, Mencho roams about his domain via four-wheel-drive convoys or small aircraft, always surrounded by large numbers of heavily-armed paramilitary fighters who wear insignia identifying them as FEM, Fuerzas Especiales Mencho or Grupo X, which specializes in fighting rival cartels. Like Osama Bin Laden, he avoids using phones and instead uses messengers.
For a commando team, armed drone or precision-guided munition to find Mencho and his party, precise GPS coordinates would be needed, and they’ll be hard to come by.
“He moves pretty often,” a U.S. expert who has recently assessed the kingpin’s vulnerabilities told The Cipher Brief. “So the intelligence on his location would have to be extremely good. Which it’s not.”
Whether surveillance drones could obtain reliable coordinates on Mencho’s position in real time is questionable. “Where Mencho is hiding they can hear drones coming,” the U.S. expert said. “It’s so quiet out there there’s no noise pollution. They’ve been successfully avoiding SEMAR’s drones for years.” SEMAR is U.S. military shorthand for a Mexican navy/marines special operations unit that has trained with the U.S. Navy SEALs and worked closely with the U.S.
The cartel has its own drone unit, called the Operadores Droneros, complete with badges.Cartel operatives also set up security cameras, like hunting cameras, to detect the presence of outsiders.
“They have a lot of early warning capability,” said Chavarria, who used to run the DEA’s office in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, then ran investigations of the Gulf cartel out of Houston. “I don't think that we have the type of precise intelligence that would allow us to effect an operation. And even if it's available, it's time-sensitive, it's perishable. If you're not there on top of your objective, you're going to miss. And then there's going to be gunfights and a lot of innocent people are going to get killed. Mencho hangs out in cities, he bounces around because he's untouchable. He's got police escorts, he's got state cops and municipal cops protecting him. His men have ringed perimeters of security, where they're communicating with one another on various frequencies that are digitally encrypted. So it's very difficult for the U.S. to crack those encryptions, and obviously for the Mexican security forces as well.”
According to Chavarria and other current and former officials, the CJNG has extensive counter-surveillance capabilities. Cartel security officers, known as sicarios, literally, assassins, issue mobile phones with heavily encrypted voice-over-internet and radio-over-internet apps to hundreds of human lookouts, called halcones, meaning hawks, spies, who are under orders to report any strangers showing up in cartel territory.
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Mexican security forces have been driven back every time they’ve tried to get close to Mencho. Notoriously, on May 1, 2015, a Mexican military helicopter that flew over his convoy in Jalisco state was shot down by the cartel paramilitary force with an Iranian-made rocket-propelled grenade and .50 caliber belt-fed machine gun. Nine Mexican soldiers and federal police died, and others were severely wounded. Rubén Oseguera González, AKA Menchito, Mencho’s California-born son and second-in-command, then 25, was accused of ordering the attack on the helicopter. The Mexican military and police mounted a massive operation to track him to a wealthy suburb of Guadalajara. Menchito was extradited to Los Angeles, prosecuted for violating U.S. drug laws, convicted last September and on March 7, sentenced tolife plus 30 years in a U.S. prison.
The U.S. victory was short-lived. Mencho’s stepson Juan Carlos Valencia González, a California-born U.S. citizen who is the son of Oseguera’s wife, Rosalinda González Valencia and has emerged as Mencho’s heir-apparent. A leader in the cartel’s elite commando force, he’s known as R-3. The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for him. ( His mother Rosalinda, AKA La Jefa, comes from a powerful cartel dynasty, the Valencias. Her uncle is Armando Valencia, AKA El Maradona, founder of the Milenio Cartel, the predecessor of the CJNG. A major player in her own right, Rosalinda spent time in a Mexican prison for money laundering but was released last February, according to news reports in Mexico.)
Sheinbaum has convinced many in Washington that she is sincere in her determination to break the power of the cartels, especially the CJNG, which has menaced her administration unceasingly.
In 2020, Sheinbaum’s trusted advisor Omar García Harfuch, then Mexico City’s chief of police, narrowly survived a CJNG assasination attempt. Sheinbaum was Mexico City’s mayor at the time. When Sheinbaum became president in October 2024, she named Harfuch national security minister and accelerated military raids on CJNG labs and other sites.
But so far, the cartel has proved stronger. Last March, Mexican soldiers and national guardsmen driving in a convoy near CJNG territory on the border between Jalisco and Michoacán states were ambushed, and six security force officers and three CJNG hitmen were killed. Three days later, security forces in the area were again ambushed, two of their number killed and the rest forced to retreat.
On May 1, exactly 10 years to the day after the helicopter downing, Oseguera staged a flamboyant retribution for the incarceration of his son Menchito. Iván Morales Corrales, a Mexican policeman who survived the crash, badly burned, was decorated as a national hero and testified against Menchito in the U.S. trial in Los Angeles, was gunned down with his wife while driving on a quiet street in a town far from the CJNG’s turf. This was an unmistakable statement that the cartel could reach anyone, anywhere, anytime.
David Cristobal Barraza Sainz, known as Commander "Nitro" within the Sinaloa State Police, was shot and killed after an attack that took place on Pedro Infante Boulevard at around 1:00 p.m in Sinaloa, Mexico on July 15, 2025. (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Derek Maltz, who served as DEA administrator until June and before that ran the agency’s elite Special Operations Division for a decade, believes that if the Mexican army fails to mount more operations against the CJNG and other cartel strongholds, the Trump team will seriously consider unilateral operations, despite Sheinbaum’s vocal objections. “If the U.S. government doesn't perceive that Mexico has the will or capabilities to literally take them off the playing field, I wouldn't be surprised that the administration is looking at targeted strikes on the [cartel] leadership,” Maltz told The Cipher Brief. “ I would personally encourage it. The president has made it clear that he's going to place American families first, trying to keep everyone safe and secure. So if it means taking out some kingpins in the narco-terrorist world, I would fully support that.”
As a practical matter, a raid or two wouldn’t solve the problem. Mexico’s cartels, like major corporations, could survive the loss of a few key executives. “Killing Mencho would be significant, but it's not going to take out the organization,” Craine said. “You're going to have to have sustained operations against the whole network.”
A global syndicate of evil
The CJNG has built out a complicated and durable executive structure in recent years as it has gone global and diversified.
“Mencho is expanding around the world,” Maltz told The Cipher Brief. He and his allies “have recognized the threat to their business enterprise with the increased attention by the Trump administration. So they're adjusting strategies, realigning, identifying new partnerships, being strategic in some of their global routes and capitalizing on the market in different areas of the world.” Maltz and other DEA veterans say Mencho has cemented international alliances with organized crime syndicates, from motorcycle gangs in the U.S to the Japanese Yakuza. When the profits to be made from human trafficking dwindled due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on the border, the CJNG developed other robust cash streams, including stealing fuel from the Mexican oil company PEMEX and other energy outlets, extorting avocado farmers, and even smuggling mercury, a pricey, poisonous by-product of gold-mining, according to the DEA and news reports.
“The CJNG is the first international criminal conglomerate,” Craine said. “It’s the first ICC to operate worldwide and to have criminal control of legal commodities and services as well, such as oil, gasoline, minerals, chemicals, timber, government funding, infrastructure and resources, armed forces, weapons, politics, police services, judicial systems, international financial services, and so forth.”
What’s most alarming is the significant CJNG and Sinaloa cartel presence in the U.S.
“What we face today in Southern California is a full-scale infiltration by foreign criminal empires, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel – paramilitary organizations with global supply chains, corporate level logistics, and battlefield tactics,” Matthew Allen, DEA’s chief of operations, told the Senate Judiciary committee last June.
Allen testified that a few weeks earlier, a DEA team had raided an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks from the agency’s big Southern California office. Hidden inside, the agents discovered, was a luxurious CJNG safe house with places for cartel operatives to lounge, a pool table, polished floors and, presiding over it all, a floor-to-ceiling mural of El Mencho, depicted in a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the CJNG insignia and Mencho’s personal symbol, a bloody cockfight.
It was, Allen said, “a shrine, not hidden in the jungle or some remote compound but right in the heart of the heart of America’s second-largest city. The message was clear: ‘We are here. We are among you’.”
Image of Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación safe house in Los Angeles.(DEA Official)
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Extremists are exploiting political violence by using online platforms to recruit new people to their causes and amplify the use of violence for political goals, according to a new report that monitored social platforms after recent attacks.
OPINION — One of the most enduring security issues in South Asia has been rekindled by the recent border conflicts between the Taliban-led Afghanistan and Pakistan military regimes. Diplomatic efforts by Qatar and Turkey have resulted in a tenuous ceasefire after days of fierce fighting that claimed scores of lives on both sides, offering a little respite from the rising violence. However, talks for a lasting peace have since collapsed. The crisis reveals long-standing structural tensions along one of the most volatile frontiers in the world that have their roots in militant activity, historical enmity, and disputed sovereignty.
Escalation and Triggers of Conflict
Intense fighting broke out along several stretches of the 2,600-kilometer Afghanistan-Pakistan Durand line in early October 2025, especially close to Spin Boldak–Chaman and the Kurram tribal areas. Each side accused the other of starting the conflict. The Taliban-led government denounced Pakistan's retaliatory bombings as a violation of national sovereignty, while Pakistan asserted that militants connected to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) were conducting cross-Durand line attacks from Afghan territory. According to reports, Pakistani air raids in the provinces of Kandahar and Paktika killed dozens of civilians. Taliban members retaliated by attacking a number of Pakistani military installations, with the opposing side suffering heavy losses. Afghan traders are losing millions of dollars every day as a result of the conflict's rapid disruption of humanitarian and commercial routes, which led to the closure of important Durand line crossings.
This breakdown was not the first. Pakistan has long accused the Afghan Taliban of harbouring the TTP, a group committed to destroying Pakistan's government but philosophically linked with Kabul's leadership. The Taliban have refuted these claims, stating that Afghanistan forbids the use of its territory against other countries. However, the Durand Line, from the colonial era, continues to function as a political and geographic fault line, trapping both sides in a never-ending blame game.
The Doha-Istanbul Ceasefire Agreement
An emergency ceasefire agreement was reached on October 19, 2025, following nearly a week of fighting, thanks to intensive mediation by Qatar and Turkey. Both parties committed to immediately stopping offensive operations, prohibiting cross-Durand line attacks, and setting up systems for ensuring compliance under the agreement. To address implementation and verification procedures, a follow-up meeting was planned for October 25 in Istanbul. The deal was heralded as a diplomatic victory, particularly since Turkey and Qatar, who both have comparatively open lines of communication with the Taliban leadership, were instrumental in facilitating communication between two regimes which do not trust one another.
Khawaja Muhammad Asif, the defence minister for the Pakistani military dictatorship, underlined that Islamabad would evaluate the truce based on the Taliban's capacity to control the TTP. "This agreement will be broken by anything coming from Afghanistan," he cautioned. The Taliban's stated position that Afghanistan "will not allow its soil to be used against any country" was reaffirmed by Zabihullah Mujahid, the regime's spokesperson. Although these declarations show official dedication, they conceal more profound disparities in ability and perspective. The Taliban government sees the threat as a matter of border integrity and sovereignty, whereas Pakistan primarily sees it through the prism of counterterrorism. It will take more than diplomatic words to bridge different viewpoints.
Istanbul Talks
The follow-up talks in Istanbul — intended to turn the Doha truce into an enforceable framework—ended without a resolution after four days of negotiations. Reporting from multiple outlets indicates that mediators could not bridge the gap over concrete action against TTP networks allegedly operating from Taliban controlled soil and over how to verify any commitments. Pakistani regime’s officials briefed that Kabul was unwilling to accept binding steps to rein in or relocate the TTP; Afghan sources countered that the Taliban does not command or control the TTP and rejects responsibility for cross-Durand line attacks.
On the eve of, and during, the Istanbul round, Pakistan’s defence minister publicly warned that failure would risk “open war,” underscoring how narrow the window is for diplomacy if violence resumes along the frontier. While he acknowledged the ceasefire had broadly held for several days, he framed the talks’ success as contingent on Kabul’s verifiable curbs on the TTP. Reports say talks in Istanbul have restarted in another attempt for a deal.
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Key unresolved issues
First, TTP-focused measures: Islamabad sought explicit commitments (dismantling safe havens, detentions/relocations, or handovers of wanted militants), while Kabul insists it won’t allow Afghan territory to be used against neighbours but resists operations that might trigger internal backlash or fracture ties with sympathetic factions. No binding text on TTP was agreed.
Second, a verification and incident-prevention mechanism: negotiators discussed joint hotlines, third-party monitoring, or liaison teams stationed in cross-Durand line hubs to investigate incidents in real time. Talks stalled over scope, authority, and who would adjudicate disputes.
Third, the Durand Line: Pakistan has fenced large stretches and wants coordinated patrols and recognized crossing protocols; the Taliban does not formally recognize the Durand Line as an international boundary, making technical fixes politically sensitive. This gap persisted in Istanbul.
Fourth, trade and crossings: business lobbies on both sides pushed for a timetable to reopen Spin Boldak–Chaman and other checkpoints for normal commerce and humanitarian flows, but negotiators did not finalize sequencing (security steps first vs. parallel reopening).
Fifth, refugees and returns: Islamabad raised concerns around undocumented Afghans and cross-Durand line facilitation; Kabul pressed for humanitarian safeguards. No durable arrangement was announced.
Obstacles to Durable Peace
The structural issues threatening Afghanistan-Pakistan ties are still mostly unaddressed in spite of the truce. First, the ceasefire does not include militant organisations like the TTP. Their independence severely restricts the enforceability of the agreement. According to analysts, the Taliban are reluctant to use force to fight the TTP because of ethnic and ideological ties that make internal Afghan politics more difficult.
Second, monitoring is quite challenging because of the porous nature of the Durand-line. Pakistan has unilaterally fenced off significant portions of the Durand Line, whereas Afghanistan does not formally recognise it as an international border. Recurrent conflicts are exacerbated by this lack of mutual recognition, especially when it comes to security patrols and cross-Durand line trading.
Third, there is still an imbalance of interests. Attacks by militants coming from Afghanistan are the problem for Pakistan. Pakistan's repeated airstrikes and backing of anti-Taliban groups are the source of Kabul's resentment. Joint security coordination is hampered by these conflicting narratives.
Fourth, pressure from within both governments is increasing. While the Taliban in Afghanistan must strike a compromise between meeting external demands and preserving their credibility among nationalist and tribal factions, public annoyance in Pakistan has increased due to an increase in attacks on security forces. Internal resentment could result from any impression of giving in.
Last but not least, the economic aspect introduces another level of complication. Afghanistan relies significantly on cross-border trade through Pakistan for imports and transit to global markets. Significant financial losses and humanitarian difficulties have resulted from the bridge closures. Unless trade flows restart fully, the truce will have limited practical effects.
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The Strategic and Regional Implications
There are wider ramifications for South and Central Asia from the crisis and the resulting truce.
Stability and militancy in the region: Should the truce fail, transnational militant networks, such as IS-K and al-Qaida elements, may gain more confidence. Resuming hostilities might destabilise the entire region, as these organisations flourish in uncontrolled border areas.
Taliban governance: The truce also serves as a litmus test for the Taliban's ability to govern. Global opinions of its legitimacy as a ruling power will be influenced by its capacity to maintain territorial control, interact diplomatically, and quell militant groups.
Realignments in diplomacy: The participation of Qatar and Turkey demonstrates how regional diplomacy is changing. Both nations have established themselves as go-betweens that can interact with the Taliban government without granting official recognition. Their mediation highlights a changing power dynamic in South Asia, where non-Western actors are having a greater impact on resolving disputes.
Economic and humanitarian impact: The conflict's humanitarian effects go beyond its security implications. Food and medical supplies have been disrupted by the closing of the Cross-Durand line, and the situation for displaced people on both sides of the frontier is getting worse. Maintaining peace will depend on reopening trade channels and making sure help is delivered.
The Road Ahead
The establishment of cooperative verification systems, a quantifiable decline in militant attacks, and the resumption of trade are important markers to keep an eye on. If any party breaks the agreement, the area can quickly revert to hostilities. It will be a careful balancing act for Pakistan to keep pressure on the Taliban without inciting escalation. The ability of the Taliban to control militant organisations while maintaining internal unity and sovereignty will be put to the test in Afghanistan. Supporting monitoring, communication, and de-escalation procedures is essential for regional partners, especially Qatar and Turkey, to continue their mediation efforts beyond symbolic diplomacy. As of October 28, the Istanbul process has adjourned without a deal, leaving these markers unmet and the ceasefire’s durability uncertain until verifiable steps are negotiated.
In the end, the ceasefire between Afghanistan and Pakistan serves as an example of the potential and vulnerability of regional diplomacy in a post-Western security context. In addition to bilateral discussions, broad regional collaboration tackling the interconnected problems of militancy, Durand-line governance, and economic interdependence will be necessary for a lasting peace. The willingness of both regimes to turn promises into tangible, verifiable action will determine whether this armistice develops into long-lasting stability or just serves as another brief break in a lengthy history of antagonism.
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Abstract: Hamas has never carried out a successful terrorist attack outside of Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza—but not for lack of plotting. Over the years, the group came close to carrying out attacks abroad several times, but these were either thwarted or aborted before execution. Now, recent criminal cases in Germany and Denmark reveal that Hamas set in motion contingency planning for possible attacks in Europe several years before the October 7 massacre, including stashing small arms in weapons caches in multiple European countries.
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