American spies and special forces will be able to hunt down those behind Thursday’s suicide bombing in Kabul, although the effort may take years, experts and former CIA officials believe.

Joe Biden vowed on Thursday to avenge the 13 US service members who died in a suicide bomb attack at the Kabul airport, declaring to the extremists responsible: “We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

Analysts say, however, the US president has few options that will allow him to make good on this pledge – at least in the short-term, with US troops withdrawing within days – and the pressure to get quick results is immense.

“His options are absolutely limited. It’s bad options all around. We lost 13 guys. People are sad and angry and there is a perception that the US is being humiliated,” said Colin Clarke, senior research fellow at the US-based Soufan Centre.

But Philip Mudd, a former deputy director of the counterterrorist centre at the CIA, said he was confident that Biden, or possibly a successor, would fulfil the promise.

“It is really a question of timescale. We have capabilities that have been honed over 20 years,” he said. “My friends will hunt these people down. It might take a while, and there may not be a strike in 30 days, but in five years whoever did this will find themselves at the wrong end of a strike.”

A second former US intelligence officer and two former military consultants involved in earlier hunts for Islamic militants contacted by the Guardian agreed.

None doubt that the challenge of tracking down a clandestine network of extremist militants in a lawless country is significant – even when an intelligence service has a network of informants, surveillance capabilities available on the ground and the cooperation of a capable local force or government.

In Iraq, between 2005 and around 2010, US special forces found, killed or captured hundreds of extremists in thousands of raids.In 2019, the leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was found and killed.

Even in Pakistan, where authorities offered only partial support, the CIA were able to capture a series of top level al-Qaida operatives while drone strikes were used to deny the group easy use of the rugged and inaccessible tribal zones, killing more top leaders, though at the cost of civilian casualties.

In Afghanistan, too, with the assistance of the US-backed government, American and allied special forces have conducted weekly or even daily raids against fighters and leaders of the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (ISKP).

But all such operations require two things: timely, accurate intelligence combined with “assets” either on the ground or very close to the target. The two often go together, experts point out. US counterterrorist agencies work to “find, fix and finish” a target. The key element is the second, which involves knowing an individual’s location over a specific duration so he can then be attacked by whatever means available, one former official said.

This is where the now limited access to Afghanistan could be a major problem. The US has pulled out all its spies, evacuated many informants or paid off others, and has no Afghan government agencies to help either. Neighbouring nations are either actively hostile or expected to be uncooperative, so unlikely to help share intelligence.

In February, William J Burns, the director of the CIA, told Congress bluntly that the withdrawal of the US military from Afghanistan would diminish the American government’s ability to collect and act on threats. “That’s simply a fact,” he said.

Nor are neighbours likely to help with bases for drones or aircraft either, meaning much longer approach times and more complex logistics for any strike.

Biden appears to have given himself some leeway over timing – which is significant, analysts say. The president told the nation that the response would be “with force and precision at our time, at the place of our choosing”.

“The president has given himself some wriggle room,” said Clarke.

But expectations of a fast strike to exact revenge may be disappointed.

Mudd said that the first takedown of a senior al-Qaida operative came six months after 9/11 and that US intelligence services had frequently needed many years to find fugitives.

Osama bin Laden escaped the US dragnet at Tora Bora in December 2001, but was finally tracked down through a combination of painstaking pursuit of leads and cutting-edge technology to a compound in the northern Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad where he was killed after a decade on the run. One of his followers, an alleged leader of al-Qaida’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa, was captured by US special forces in a raid in Tripoli in Libya after a 13-year hunt.

“Clearly access is going to be a problem but it is not an impossible job,” Mudd said. “It’s not correct that we have no one in country. We can develop new relationships in Afghanistan and over one or two years someone among the people we are looking for is going to make a mistake. I don’t think the president is overpromising.”