I assume that most of you remember during the early days of the “negotiations” with the Taliban when America and our western allies were busy telling their political office in Qatar that any international aid and recognition would be dependent on their promise to stop Afghanistan from becoming a launching point for new terror attacks on the west. Good times, my friends, good times. Then, when we offered to try to work with the Taliban to wipe out ISIS in their country, they told us to go pound sand. More recently, our own Pentagon warned that ISIS-K in Afghanistan could be ready to launch terror attacks on the west within six months. Apparently, six months doesn’t last as long as it did when I was a lad, because Washington is being put on high alert this weekend and until after the elections are over. Why? Because our DHS security chief said they have discovered intelligence showing that ISIS is already planning attacks and they could be imminent. (NY Post)

Northern Virginia authorities were on high alert following an ISIS threat against malls and shopping centers outside the US capital this weekend.

Police were stepping up their presence through Halloween into the runup of Election Day, according to CBS News.

“We have increased our police presence throughout the county to include major thoroughfares, transit hubs, shopping plazas and shopping malls,” Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis reportedly said Friday.

The only good news out of this story (if anything in this category can be considered “good news”) is that it doesn’t sound like ISIS or ISIS-K is back to the point where they can have a lot of fighters infiltrate our country for an organized, large-scale attack. Instead, they’re back up to their old tricks that we saw before we finally broke up their organization in Syria and Iraq. They’re contacting potential “lone wolf” sympathizers in the United States over social media and encouraging them to go take one for the team.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that those lone-wolf attacks can’t be serious and deadly. Recall how much damage was wrought by one Islamic ISIS sympathizer and his wife in San Bernardino back in December of 2015. They managed to kill 14 people and seriously injured 22 others during an attack on the Inland Regional Center. And that was far from the only such plot that the group managed to “inspire” and pull off.

If ISIS is indeed back on the air (in the social media and dark web sense) and communicating with their sympathizers, that was certainly a quick turnabout after a sustained period when we hadn’t been seeing much activity over the past five years or so. If they are coordinating resources for prospective martyrs – with little reason to think they wouldn’t be – we may be seeing a return to the bad old days when Joe Biden was last in the executive branch.

Even more to the point, this may well turn out to be the next log on the bonfire of things that the White House has gotten wrong about Afghanistan and radical Islamic terrorism in general. First they refused to believe how quickly the Taliban would move to retake the country. Then they assured everyone that we had trained the Afghan army to hold them back, giving us plenty of time to evacuate. Then there were even some people who were foolish enough to believe that the kinder, gentler Taliban would change their stripes on the rights of women and minorities in their country. And now, the most important goal we had in the entire Afghan engagement – to make sure it didn’t turn into a new and improved HQ for Islamic terror groups – seems to have fallen apart in barely two months.

How many times does one administration get to be so wrong about so many things in foreign policy while receiving little more than a shrug of the shoulders and a free pass from the mainstream media? And the situation with Afghanistan and Islamic terror isn’t the only foreign policy area where the wheels have been coming off of the American bus this year. Has anyone noticed that the Democratic forces of the world may be about to lose Taiwan the same way we already lost Hong Kong? And Turkey is little more than a client state of Russia at this point, though they are still sporting plenty of military hardware with a “Made in the USA” label on it.

None of this is looking good, but if we’re going to go back to having Islamic terror attacks right in our own country on a regular basis again, something needs to change radically. Sadly, we’re probably stuck with this foreign policy position for at least three more years. And replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris likely wouldn’t improve things one bit.