Three years after the hasty U.S. retreat from Afghanistan, countries across Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa have all suffered a surge in acts of terrorism, The Hill reported on Friday.

In August of 2021, the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan, ending a military presence in the beleaguered nation that lasted almost 20 years. The Taliban swiftly regained control of the country and the U.S. left behind billions in military weapons and equipment. Thirteen American service members were killed by a terrorist explosion at the Kabul airport in the final hours of the disastrous withdrawal.

Since the U.S. left the region, the Islamic State group have regained their momentum. In July, U.S. Central Command released a report that indicated they were responsible for 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria in the first six months of 2024 and was "on pace to more than double the total number of attacks" it carried out in 2023.

In August alone, terrorists claimed responsibility for a stabbing in Germany and nearly pulled off a mass casualty event at a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.

Following the decades long experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq, policy makers in Washington know that the American public has little interest in a massive U.S. troop presence in hostile territory. Yet, foreign policy experts caution that threats are continuing to manifest, and the government is not responding accordingly.

Colin Clarke, a nonresident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute said to the outlet, "It takes one bomb going off in Times Square. We’re just far too reactive in our policy, and we’re not proactive enough." 

"We haven’t learned a lot, sadly, I think, from 9/11. We need to prepare for these things and prepare our responses. We’ve got to be clinical. We’ve got to be kind of judicious in how we respond to these issues," he added. 

Weapons left behind by the U.S. in Afghanistan have been found in Pakistan and experts warn that is only the beginning of the "global journey" of America’s military hardware. Even if the Taliban doesn’t use the weapons themselves, the billions donated by the Biden administration give them a new source of income to trade with terror groups.

"When combined with the Taliban’s need for money and extant smuggling networks, that reservoir poses a substantial threat to regional actors for years to come," said Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the Center for Naval Analyses to NBC News.

• When the US Left Kabul, These Americans Tried to Help Afghans Left Behind. It Still Haunts Them
• Germany Deports Afghan Nationals for First Time since Taliban Takeover in 2021