Fighting Terrorism from Afar

Can Joe Biden’s ‘over-the-horizon’ strategy in Afghanistan keep America safe? Defense experts are skeptical

- By Bill Powell

WITHIN THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE, AND IN corners of the U.S. military and intelligence bureaucracy, it is the phrase of the moment: “over the horizon.”

The expression refers to efforts to counter terrorism from afar, without troops on the ground, and it has been in the defense lexicon dating back to the Cold War. The appeal is obvious: When dealing with threats like Al-Qaeda or like-minded terrorist groups, why bother with dangerous, forward deployed missions in unstable places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or North Africa, when you can launch a Tomahawk missile from somewhere in the Arabian Sea and be done with it? “Over the horizon,” to Joe Biden, means the end of “endless wars.” You can hit the enemy from above, and from far away. Thus, we can bug out of Afghanistan and not worry about it.

Biden has used the phrase before in reference to Afghanistan; so have Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley. The latest iteration came during the president’s August 16 speech following the fall of the Afghan capital of Kabul to the Taliban. Trying to reassure the nation that pulling U.S. forces out of the country would not interfere with the critical objective of preventing a terrorist attack on American soil, Biden said, “We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed.”

The problem: While the strategy is politically popular among a war-weary public, in defense and intelligence circles in Washington, and among U.S. allies, “over the horizon” is a deeply controversial— and mostly unpopular—concept.