We've got breaking news for you from Afghanistan, where there are significant casualties,

including some Americans from a suicide attack outside the country's main airport in Kabul.

Last Thursday, an attack at Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul killed 13 American

service members and scores of Afghan civilians.

It was terrible and shocking.

But for people who were closely following the on-the-ground situation in Afghanistan,

the question in the days leading up to the attack wasn't whether

something like this would happen, but just when and how. What made you so sure that this

attack was coming? I don't know, maybe gut instinct, having studied this for two decades.

Colin Clark is the director of policy and research at the Sufong Group, an intelligence and

security consulting firm.

He spent his career observing the behavior of terrorist networks, understanding the players,

and trying to anticipate what they'll do next.

A colleague and friend of mine and Charlie Winter, who's a researcher,

had tweeted out, I think, maybe the morning of Wednesday morning,

when the initial warnings were offered,

that ISIS Corrason Province had gone quiet for about 11 days after, you know, a pretty high operational tempo.

And they completely dropped off. And he said, this seems odd. And I thought to myself, it sure does, unless you were planning for something quite big.

ISIS Corrason, or ISK, immediately claimed credit for the airport attack.

The group is an Afghan offshoot of the ISIS organization that we're familiar with,

the one that terrorized Iraq and Syria.

And they achieved their objectives.

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