‘Over the horizon’ too far to fight terrorists in Afghanistan; ISIS-K emerges as deadly threat

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It was billed as a lethal counterterrorism insurance policy for America after its inglorious military exit from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Biden administration officials argued that the U.S. military did not need to be on the ground to fight the bad guys. Instead, it would rely on “over the horizon” missions, mainly in the form of drone strikes, to kill Islamic terrorists in and around Afghanistan before they became a threat to America and its allies.

The ability to find, target and eliminate extremists, President Biden promised, would not suffer.

In the three years since the withdrawal, the U.S. has carried out exactly one over-the-horizon strike in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, the terrorist group’s Afghan affiliate better known as ISIS-K, has grown rapidly into a force capable of conducting external operations, such as the massacre at a concert hall in Moscow last month and an assault on a military funeral in Iran earlier this year. Pentagon officials have warned that the group aims to strike U.S. interests as well.

Critics say the rise of ISIS-K and America’s limited ability to do anything about it illustrate the fundamental flaws of banking on an over-the-horizon strategy as an adequate replacement for boots on the ground.

In Afghanistan, “terrorists enjoy the same open-field running they did before 9/11 …,” retired CIA Clandestine Services officer Daniel N. Hoffman told the “Threat Status” podcast recently. “We don’t have the capability to kill those guys, let alone find and fix their locations.

“There’s no such thing as ‘over the horizon,’” he said. “You can’t see it. That’s an awful, very intellectually dishonest way to describe our strategy. The attack in Moscow ought to be a wake-up call for Europe and the United States that they’re coming after us.

“We don’t have the capability any longer to do what we need to do against them,” Mr. Hoffman said of ISIS-K and other terrorist groups.

Fallback plan

The concept of remote, technology-aided strikes was central to Mr. Biden’s justification for pulling all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

“We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries,” the president said in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. exit. “We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground — or very few if needed.”

Some analysts caution that it’s too simplistic to say the U.S. could have entirely prevented the rise of ISIS-K if Mr. Biden had taken a different path and kept at least some troops in Afghanistan, as his top generals advised. The terrorist group was already a force to be reckoned with while U.S. troops were in Afghanistan, as evidenced by the ISIS-K suicide bombing that killed 13 Marines at the Kabul airport during the frantic American pullout in August 2021.

The ruling Taliban regime in Kabul has also vowed to battle the Islamic State group but so far has not been able to oust the terrorist network from the remote regions where it operates.

Pentagon officials say over-the-horizon strikes have proved viable options in some circumstances. They point to U.S. forces’ drone strike in July 2022 that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Kabul, a major victory in the American fight against Islamic terrorist groups.

Analysts acknowledge the viability of one-off strikes but say sustained anti-terrorist campaigns in Afghanistan, across Central Asia and even parts of Africa have become exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, given the limits of the over-the-horizon strategy. In that respect, U.S. counterterrorism capabilities have diminished since the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“There is a big challenge with ‘over the horizon’ in several respects. One is base access,” said Seth Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “If you look at a couple of key theaters, including in South Asia [and] Afghanistan, where we have seen some active plotting that has come from ISIS-Khorasan, the U.S. does not have basing access.

“There is base access in the [Persian] Gulf. But it’s a little harder to do any kind of sustained campaign from those long distances,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s one thing if one is trying to conduct occasional targeting, say, [the strike on] Zawahri, but a sustained campaign — the U.S. doesn’t have the basing access.”

The U.S. will soon encounter similar problems in Africa’s Sahel region, widely viewed as the new global epicenter of Islamic extremism.

U.S. officials said this month that they will begin planning to pull American troops from Niger, where the U.S. has a major drone and surveillance base that covers the entire unsettled region. Relations between the U.S. and the ruling military junta in Niger have deteriorated, and the Nigerien government says it no longer wants American or other foreign troops in the country.

Without base access in Niger, the U.S. will have significant difficulty in launching counterterrorism missions in the region, which is home to numerous ISIS and al Qaeda affiliates and other terrorist groups.

Limits to American power

Such missions won’t be impossible, however. U.S. personnel and assets are stationed in other corners of Africa and could, at least theoretically, strike targets when necessary.

Flying American drones from bases in the Middle East to Afghanistan may be much more logistically difficult, but also not impossible. The al-Zawahri strike proved that America can collect intelligence on a target’s location and the military capability to eliminate that target even in a country like Afghanistan, even with a hostile Taliban government that has minimal relations with the West in charge.

Such long-distance missions require significant military assets, including the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, capabilities needed in the run-up to a strike to find and identify potential targets.

U.S. military commanders in the region readily acknowledge the growing need for such assets. Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, was asked last month whether he had received all the ISR assets he requested from the Pentagon.

“I don’t think any combatant commander has all the assets” he wants, Gen. Kurilla told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We have received some, and there’s some that I have asked for that I have not received.”

Another significant problem facing the U.S. is the lack of reliable partners on the ground. Without American personnel in countries such as Afghanistan and Niger, the U.S. is more reliant on other nations for logistical support, intelligence-gathering and the basing access that could underpin sustained anti-terror campaigns.

The Pentagon has found few willing partners. Talk of a semi-permanent U.S. base elsewhere in Central Asia, such as Uzbekistan, has mostly fizzled out. Pakistan, which has a long and complex history with America in the post-9/11 “war on terror” era, also appears reluctant to allow U.S. forces to routinely use its territory or airspace for counterterrorism missions against ISIS-K or al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Both instances highlight the challenges to American power and influence in the 21st century.

“Central Asia has become much more a sphere of influence for the Russians, and Pakistan has become more a sphere of influence of the Chinese,” said Mr. Jones, the CSIS analyst. “So, it’s become much more difficult diplomatically. And second of all, counterterrorism has just not been a big priority of the administration. U.S. diplomats have not placed a lot of incentive to negotiate with countries in these areas because the focus has been on China in the Pacific, as well as in Europe, Ukraine, and then obviously to some degree around the Middle East.”