Where’s Biden’s Plan to Stop Terrorism? He acknowledges the national interest, but his administration has failed to develop a strategy. By Seth G. Jones
President Biden said Monday that “our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on [the] American homeland.” Yet one of the administration’s most egregious failures has been neglecting to develop a clear strategy to target terrorists in the country. With more than 10,000 foreign fighters already there, from groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State, the administration quickly needs an armed surveillance strategy that involves using intelligence and air power to target terrorists.
U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies have long known the Taliban continue to have close ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. In a June 2021 assessment, the United Nations Security Council concluded that a “large number of al Qaeda fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan.” The Taliban this week released thousands of them from prisons in Bagram, Kabul, Kandahar and elsewhere.
The Taliban and al Qaeda enjoy longstanding personal relationships, intermarriage, a shared history of struggle and sympathetic ideologies. Al Qaeda leaders have pledged loyalty to every Taliban leader since the group’s establishment. It is shocking, then, that U.S. officials have brushed off the implications of a Taliban victory, even as intelligence analysts said that a Taliban victory would likely be a boon for jihadists.
The Taliban has well-established ties with other regional and international terrorist groups, such as the Pakistan-based Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. In addition, there are roughly 2,000 Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan, and the group has conducted mass-casualty attacks across the country.
The Taliban victory presents a remarkable opportunity for these groups to reorganize and threaten the U.S. at home and abroad. Jihadist groups gleefully celebrated the Taliban’s conquest of Kabul on chat rooms and other online platforms, pledging the revitalization of a global jihad. We have seen this before. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late 1980s spawned al Qaeda.
The best way to target terrorists in Afghanistan is through armed overwatch—collecting intelligence from airborne assets and striking terrorists from drones and fighter jets. The U.S. will need to fly persistent strike and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) missions, most likely from Qatar and other countries in the Persian Gulf.
The unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drone is probably the most effective U.S. platform for conducting intelligence and strike missions against al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists. It takes a Reaper some 12 hours to fly round-trip from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar to Afghanistan over Pakistani territory, giving it several hours of flying time in Afghanistan to conduct intelligence and strike missions. The newest MQ-9 platform, the MQ-9B SkyGuardian, would be even better and allow the U.S. to fly at least 15 hours over Afghanistan with a larger payload.
The SkyGuardian would be particularly useful for conducting lethal strikes against terrorists in the country, as the U.S. has done elsewhere. In addition, the U.S. could use other aircraft flying from the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and elsewhere to conduct strikes. Since the Taliban doesn’t yet have significant surface-to-air missile capabilities or an air force, the U.S. will continue to have air superiority in Afghanistan.
Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be the most significant foreign-policy failure of his presidency—and among the most significant foreign-policy failures of any U.S. president since the Vietnam War. An aggressive counterterrorism strategy would at least blunt the ability of terrorists to hide in Afghanistan and threaten America.
Mr. Jones is senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former senior civilian in U.S. Special Operations Command in Afghanistan, and author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan.”
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