Truly effective counterterrorism capability requires close presence to the terrorists. A moderately effective counterterrorism capability requires a moderately close presence.
Considering that the United States will have neither of those conditions in Taliban-governed Afghanistan, the Biden administration should cut out its ridiculous language about “over the horizon” capabilities.
Presence isn’t just a necessary condition for counterterrorism operations, but for military operations more generally. On Friday, the U.S. Navy would have been unable to defend international waters in the South China Sea were its warships not actually in those waters. On Friday, the U.S. Army would have been unable to collect intelligence on Russian forces in Kaliningrad were its aircraft not flying over Lithuania. On Friday, the U.S. Air Force would have been unable to evacuate personnel from Afghanistan rapidly were its planes not landing, unloading, and refueling in Qatar. On Friday, the U.S. Marine Corps would have been unable to provide a defense of last resort for U.S. embassies were its Marines not actually present in said embassies. On Friday, the CIA and Special Operations Command would have been unable to assist the Kenyan and Somali governments against al Shabab without their base in Djibouti.
In other words, presence affords a critical condition for operational capability. And the presence factor is particularly important when it comes to counterterrorism operations.
For a start, presence is critical to the development of an intelligence network of spies or agents. The 1990s-2001 taught the U.S. the hard way that unless you have spies within terrorist organizations, your ability to know what those terrorists are planning is very limited. You also need an embassy or regional base from which to host the officers who recruit and “run” the agents.
The 2001-2011 period also taught the terrorists some lessons. Namely, that you can’t avoid detection simply by using human couriers and sending messages through email draft folders. This development of terrorist tradecraft means that it is now harder to gather intelligence on terrorist groups with the resources, ambition, skill, and territorial safe havens.
We learned as much with ISIS’s November 2015 and March 2016 attacks in Paris and Brussels. Although that ISIS terrorist cell had been pinged on U.S. intelligence radar, it had not made enough noise for anyone to think it had to be disrupted. Without the support and basing offered by Jordan’s exceptional GID intelligence service, more so-called spectacular attacks on the West would almost certainly have occurred.
In Afghanistan, the White House now talks about an over-the-horizon capability, but it doesn’t care to explain where that capability will be based. This, perhaps, is because it has no bases.
Yes, the CIA may have a few deep-cover officers in Afghanistan. But they cannot run networks of hundreds of agents in the Taliban, Haqqani network, al Qaeda, and ISIS. That’s a problem because the Taliban are a close ally of the al Qaeda and Haqqani networks. Nor does President Joe Biden’s attempt to make friends with Vladimir Putin appear to bearing much counterterrorism fruit. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Putin rejected Biden’s request for a U.S. counterterrorism base in Central Asia. Iran, presumably, isn’t going to be much help. That leaves Pakistan, the security establishment of which is a close ally to the Haqqani network and bears significant responsibility for the Taliban’s victory.
Islamabad will allow some U.S. counterterrorism operations from its soil, but only at the price of vast American bribes and a restriction on the most useful operations. At best, a not-very-useful deal with the devil will allow us to fly some drones and save a few of the allies Biden left behind in Afghanistan. Chalk it up as just one failure by a struggling administration to plan adequately.
