THE nEAR WAR:

While on the surface, ISIS's shift toward mass-casualty attacks, accompanied by a targeted anti-Taliban media campaign, can be seen as signals of confidence--it's far more likely that the group is acting out of pure desperation. Both locally and globally, the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan threatens ISIS in profound new ways, and marks yet another major defeat from which ISIS will likely not recover.

ISIS's Khorasan Province, also known as ISKP or ISIS-K, originated from the Taliban and allied groups in 2015. Its pitch to the radical jihadists of Afghanistan was easy to make in those days: With the U.S. still in Afghanistan, and with its "caliphate" then growing rapidly across the world, ISIS was the group that could finally change the course of the region.

It didn't take long before the Taliban asserted its overwhelming dominance, though. Much like the Shabaab al-Mujahideen did to ISIS-pledged militants in Somalia, the Afghan Taliban steadily rooted out the vast majority of ISIS's Khorasan Province. The former Afghan government and U.S. government put further pressure on ISIS in the years that followed, helping to cut its ranks from an estimated 3,000 to 300.

Now, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan and the U.S. military gone, the ISIS sales pitch becomes a much harder sell: no "infidel" invasion of Muslim lands to rail against, and no significant ranks to resemble a "caliphate."

Today, ISIS is instead reserved to cell-based terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Its unsophisticated attacks in the last year point to its limited capabilities: IED attacks, dismantling power lines, sniper attacks, and suicide operations. And with the Taliban now armed with scores of U.S. Humvees, armored fighting vehicles, and other major weaponry, it seems very implausible that ISIS will ever have a stable base in Afghanistan.

This new reality has required ISIS to reconfigure its pitch to Afghans. The Taliban, after all, has now established an "emirate" far more secure than the "caliphate" ISIS failed to hold onto. All that considered, ISIS may have even been better off with the U.S. in Afghanistan than it is now.

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