Core Al-Qaeda Poses a High Threat to the United States | Joe Biden’s Legacy Never Recovered from the Afghan Withdrawal, and more

But Republican voters slammed Mr. Richer when he said, correctly, that the election had not been stolen from former President Donald J. Trump. Shelby Busch, a Maricopa County Republican official, even suggested she would “lynch” Mr. Richer if he walked into a room with her.
Mr. Heap galvanized that anger and mistrust while not actually declaring whether he believed the 2020 election had been stolen. He said he would restore Republican voters’ confidence in the system. Another conservative Republican challenger, Don Hiatt, had flatly declared that the past two elections in Arizona were stolen.
Mr. Heap said the pace of vote counting and equipment failures, such as a printer error that snarled voting centers on Election Day in 2022, had made Arizona a “national laughingstock.” Mr. Richer pointed out that his office was not actually responsible for some of those problems.
Mr. Heap is now expected to face Timothy Stringham, a Democrat and military veteran, in the general election in November.

Core Al-Qaeda Poses a High Threat to the United States  (Naveen Khan, HSToday)
Core al-Qaeda before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was incapable of posing a large-scale threat to the US, its interests abroad, and its allied countries. The American military presence in Afghanistan forced the organization to suffer losses of its pre-September 11, 2001 sanctuary and threatening external operations structures. Since the August 2021 US withdrawal followed by the pro-al-Qaeda Taliban’s takeover, Core al-Qaeda has regained its sanctuary with an extensive presence in Afghanistan and has also been rebuilding its external operations network.

·  Core al-Qaeda by far dominates other Afghanistan-Pakistan-based terrorist groups in the number of attack plots: 76% of attack plotters indicted in the US were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

·  Today, Core al-Qaeda has access to all the resources it had before September 11, 2001: a supportive regime in Afghanistan offering a safe haven, training camps, money, foreign fighters, and freedom to move and operate. In addition, the Taliban are now fully controlling Afghanistan as opposed to pre-9/11, which means that the above resources are now available to al-Qaeda even more abundantly, translating into a serious threat.

·  Assessments by US officials have already projected that Core al-Qaeda would be able to reconstitute its external attack capabilities within 12 to 36 months. 

·  On multiple occasions, Core al-Qaeda has expressed its unwavering intent to launch a mass-casualty attack against the US. The late senior al-Qaeda member Abu Muhammad al-Masri in his book, “The 9/11 Operations: Between Truth and Uncertainty,” claimed that his organization would next launch attacks on multiple cities in the US, on an even larger scale than September 11, 2001. 

Joe Biden’s Legacy Never Recovered from the Afghan Withdrawal  (James Cook, National Interest)
President Joe Biden’s abrupt announcement to terminate his presidential re-election campaign upended the U.S. political landscape just a few months before the November election. While foreign policy rarely features prominently in a presidential campaign, the start of his political downturn can be traced to the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. As we approach the third anniversary, the horrific scenes of chaos and confusion in Kabul will be revisited, and this unfortunate chapter in American foreign policy will torment his political legacy long after he leaves office. 
Although Biden enjoyed a “honeymoon period” at the start of his presidency, his approval rating noticeably dropped after the Afghanistan withdrawal, falling from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent a month later, according to Gallup polling. One year later, his approval rating plunged further to the 38 percent line, where it has languished since then. To be clear, Afghanistan was not the only factor affecting public opinion. The administration’s COVID-19 recovery policies created a sharp rise in inflation that compounded economic fears, intensified the (already fraught) political tensions in Washington, and exacerbated the sour mood of the country. Nevertheless, this foreign policy blunder provided an opening for his critics and political rivals to exploit during his re-election bid.
As I have written previously, President Biden deserves credit for ending America’s longest war. He concluded (correctly, in my view) that “nearly twenty years of experience has shown us that the current security situation only confirms that ‘just one more year’ of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely.” There was no clear path to “victory,” and the costs of continuing military operations in Afghanistan exceeded the benefits, especially given competing national interests in Europe (Russia) and the Indo-Pacific (China). Moreover, Biden inherited the flawed Afghanistan Peace Agreement from his predecessor, which included an infeasible deadline for withdrawing all U.S. forces by May 1, 2021. Although he subsequently extended the deadline, this did not provide nearly enough time to plan, coordinate, and execute an orderly retreat, as the administration would come to learn with horrendous consequences.

Election Deniers Are Ramping Up Efforts to Disenfranchise Voters  (David Gilbert, Wired)
For the past six months, election denial groups across the United States have been laser-focused on efforts to purge voter rolls in support of former president Donald Trump’s reelection bid.
Using new apps and online tools, they claim their volunteers have filed hundreds of thousands of voter registration challenges. Though these efforts are based on unreliable data and debunked election fraud conspiracies, they threaten to disenfranchise voters by removing legitimate registrations. And as the deadline to file these voter roll challenges approaches next week, experts warn that these groups are already planning out their next moves to stop Democratic voters in swing states.
Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, has argued for more than a decade that mismanaged voter rolls have led to widespread voter fraud. Recently, she wrote in her newsletter that True the Vote’s revamped IV3 tool, designed to automate the process of challenging voter registrations, was used by more than 35,000 volunteers. “To date, 6,937 citizens have completed 645,610 challenges across 1,322 counties,” she wrote. In a later interview on the right-wing War Room podcast, Engelbrecht said the number of challenges facilitated by IV3 was now more than 700,000.