Sunday's Drone Strike Disaster Shows the Risks of Biden's Afghanistan Strategy

The drone-strike disaster in Afghanistan on Sunday--a U.S. missile meant for a terrorist that, in fact, killed 10 civilians, five of them children, all relatives of an interpreter who'd worked for Americans during the war--shows what often happens when weapons are fired from the air with no intelligence on the ground. President Biden has said that he will keep up the pressure on the Taliban after the departure of U.S. troops through "over-the-horizon" (OTH) methods--information gathered, and weapons fired, from afar. Yet the farther away you are (and the nearest U.S. military base to Afghanistan is 1,000 miles away), the more uncertain the methods are. Or, as Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, succinctly puts it, "OTH is not precise." Usually, in planning air strikes, including remotely controlled drone strikes, myriad sources of intelligence are integrated into as complete a picture as possible--images from satellites and spy planes, views from the pilot in the plane firing the missile (if it's overhead), and communications intercepts.