Tuesday Links
- Why are we still in Iraq?
- Despite the world’s greatest nation-building efforts, things in Bosnia are still getting worse.
- Vouchers offer parents more choice in education than they currently have, but education tax credits are still better at helping the poor.
- Although federal courts have already held parts of current National Security Letter statutes unconstitutional, we still have a way to go in restoring civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.
- While Osama bin Laden has been dispatched, we still have many issues to navigate in our national security strategy. Please join us on Facebook at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today, where Cato legal policy analyst David Rittgers, who served three tours in Afghanistan with Army Special Forces, receiving an Army Commendation Medal with “V” Device for valorous action and two Bronze Star Medals, will give a LIVE video update on the future of national security policy and strategy. Submit your questions for him here.
A Race against Time or a Race to Civil War?
The drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan will start this July, with a complete withdrawal of “combat troops” by the end of 2014. The newly emerging conventional wisdom, however, is that Afghan security forces are not ready to take over responsibility, since serious efforts to strengthen those forces only really began in 2009. But rather than validate an open-ended mission to build national institutions in Afghanistan, looming problems in the hand-off from foreign to indigenous forces epitomize the flawed process of state building.
The 285,000-strong Afghan army and police, under the authority of the Ministries of Defense and Interior, respectively, are expected to increase to a total of 305,000 by this October. However, numbers tell only part of the story.
In a new report entitled “No Time to Lose,” British charity Oxfam and three other NGOs warn that the army and police, collectively known as the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), account for a substantial portion of harm inflicted on Afghan civilians. “At least 10 percent of Afghan civilians killed in the conflict in 2010 were killed by their own security forces,” according to the report. Aside from casualties, violations of human rights, including sexual abuse of children, mistreatment of detainees, and cruelty inflicted on villagers by local police, who many Afghans consider criminal gangs, illustrate the full extent of the problem.
Even worse, while the justice systems function swimmingly for those with “political connections,” the vast majority of Afghans have little recourse to stop such abuses because, “There is no satisfactory mechanism by which an individual can lodge a complaint against the ANSF.”
As the saying goes, “no justice, no peace.” And, as I learned during a trip to Afghanistan last year, many Afghans, especially those living in rural subsistence areas, seek redress for communal disputes by turning to their local district mullah. He provides basic security and rudimentary justice and, more often than not, doubles as a Taliban operative. Because the national government is either profoundly incompetent or entirely absent in many areas, those classified as “insurgents” by U.S. forces pick up the slack and provide for the practical needs of local people.
What Not to Learn from bin Laden’s Killing
The tendency to treat Osama bin Laden’s killing as national holiday akin to V-E day is both understandable and unfortunate. Everyone with a sense of justice appreciates the death of mass murderers, particularly the terrorist sort. But celebrating as if we killed Hitler or won a war plays into al Qaeda’s self-serving myth. Paul Pillar put it well:
An unfortunate irony of the huge reaction to the killing of Bin Ladin is that it continues to give him in death what he worked so hard to achieve in life: the status of arch foe of the most powerful nation on earth. It is a status that conforms with Bin Ladin’s narrative of himself as the leader of the Muslim world, protecting that world against the predations of the Judeo-Christian West, the leader of which is the United States.
We should also avoid drawing sweeping conclusions about our counterterrorism policies from Osama bin Laden’s death. We typically overgeneralize about important events. After the September 11 attacks, for example, even defense analysts tended to interpret al Qaeda’s capability largely through the purview of that plot, rather than treating it as a particularly important data point in al Qaeda’s history. The myopic take made al Qaeda seem far more capable than it was. With that in mind, here are several things that bin Laden’s death either cannot tell us much about or will not tell us much about until more information surfaces.
1. The war in Afghanistan. There are many reasons we should draw down in Afghanistan, but the bin Laden raid offers little intellectual ammunition for either side of the war debate. The intelligence that led to Abbottabad came years ago, from prisoners outside Afghanistan and operations in Pakistan. The helicopters flew from a base in Afghanistan, but it didn’t take a decade of war and a massive ground force to get that. The fact that bin Laden was living in an area of Pakistan where the state was relatively strong does nothing to support the idea that we should fight wars trying to build authority in ungoverned regions lest terrorists gain haven there.
But the fact that Sunday’s events do not serve pro-war arguments does not show logically, the correctness of the anti-war position, which is mine. The pro-war argument, flawed as it is, depends on other claims (i.e. terrorists will gain haven in Afghanistan if we draw down) that bin Laden’s death does not affect. That something is not an orange does little to tell you whether it’s a pear. Hopefully, however, bin Laden’s death may make it easier, politically to get out of Afghanistan.
The President Has an Opportunity on Afghanistan. Will He Use It?
AP Photo/David Guttenfelder
There are not going to be many better opportunities to change course in Afghanistan than the one presented by the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. It may be worth highlighting how ripe an opportunity this is:
- The politics on the Hill are changing. It probably comes as no surprise that Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Jim McGovern (D-MA) would like to end the Afghanistan war, but their “Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act” has brought on co-sponsors like Tea Party stalwarts Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Justin Amash (R-MI). This means that in the days and weeks to come, there will be Republicans on television and radio making the case for withdrawal. That could have a profound effect on where the debate goes from here. On the Senate side, establishment Republican graybeards like Richard Lugar (R-IN) seem to be indicating that their patience is wearing out.
- Wired-in reporters like Time‘s Joe Klein are saying that they believe dramatic drawdowns are coming. Here he goes so far as to suggest that the United States may draw down to roughly 20,000 troops before the end of next year.
- Gen. Petraeus is going to have a very full plate running the CIA, and will have his attention focused on running the sorts of operations like the one Sunday that got bin Laden. Moreover, his replacement, Gen. John Allen, is a Marine, which Tom Ricks suggests makes him “likely to be skeptical of Army support structure, and…likely [to] be comfortable with an austere infrastructure during the U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan.”
- Silly statements by political leaders could misinform the public in useful ways. It was absurd for Rudy Giuliani to say that getting bin Laden was “like taking out Hitler,” but if frames like World War II keep coming up, and if the war against al Qaeda is thought of in analogy with wars against powerful states, historically, once you get the head guy, the war’s over. Everyone knows that’s not the case with a maintenance problem like terrorism, but the public, like Giuliani, is probably casting about for some place where we can call this thing over and move on.
- The neoconservatives and liberal imperialists’ numbers have thinned and they have spread themselves too thinly. Between Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, the public seems to be tired of war. And my impressionistic sense is that the public increasingly has had it with the median writer at the New Republic or Weekly Standard.
- The giant debt. The fact is that cutting military spending can’t singlehandedly solve the long-term debt problem, but the zeitgeist of the day, austerity, has a way of clarifying minds about whether using their children’s credit card to pay $100-plus billion per year for a nation-building mission in Afghanistan is really worth the cost.
In short, the president has increasing political cover, a clear pivot point, a widely-appreciated need, public deference, and sound strategic logic for dramatically scaling back in Afghanistan. If he spends a nickel of every dollar of political capital he spent on Obamacare, he can do this. On the other hand, if he fails to seize the opportunity, he’ll have no one to blame but himself.
Bin Laden’s Death and the Debate over the U.S. Mission in Afghanistan
Osama Bin Laden’s death marks a significant achievement in the fight against al Qaeda. It also highlights the fact that our ostensible objective for continuing the war in Afghanistan has been achieved. Although some lawmakers have been quick to claim that bin Laden’s demise proves that our nation-building mission is showing signs of success, others recognize that this momentous achievement justifies scaling down our presence in Afghanistan. Indeed, rather than expansive counterinsurgency campaigns, targeted counterterrorism measures would suffice.
It is encouraging that Republican members of Congress are questioning the mission. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed his concern yesterday:
[Senator Lugar] said Afghanistan no longer holds the strategic importance to match Washington’s investment. He cited recent comments from senior national-security officials that terrorist strikes on America are more likely to be planned in places like Yemen.
Lugar raised concerns that U.S. policy on Afghanistan is focused more on building up its economic, political and security systems. “Such grand nation-building is beyond our powers,” he said bluntly.
Most poignantly, he summed up the problem as such:
With Al Qaeda largely displaced from the country, but franchised in other locations, Afghanistan does not carry a strategic value that justifies 100,000 American troops and a $100 billion per year cost, especially given current fiscal constraints.
These realities have neither shifted the GOP establishment’s talking points on defense, nor the Obama administration’s “stay-the-course” policy in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, this debate, especially among Republicans, is important. As my Cato colleague Ben Friedman has pointed out in original research, the Tea Party Republicans that swept into office last November may have good instincts, but have done little to shift the overarching debate about the efficacy of nation-building. Perhaps increased calls for rethinking the mission will have to come from senior GOP types like Lugar. As my other Cato colleague, Gene Healy, trenchantly notes, “There was always something odd about conservatives jumping from ‘they hate us because we’re free’ to ‘if we make them free, then they won’t hate us.”
Cato scholars have been making the case for de-escalation from Afghanistan for the past several years. Hopefully, more Republicans will recognize, as most libertarians already do, that it is inconsistent to espouse talk of fiscal responsibility and limited government at home while engaging in social engineering and nation-building abroad. More republicans should recognize that there is nothing conservative about wasting taxpayer dollars on a mission that weakens America economically and militarily. As Cato founder and president Ed Crane has argued, it’s time for the GOP leadership to return to its non-interventionist roots.
Since 9/11, America’s mission in Afghanistan has evolved dramatically. It’s gone from punishing al Qaeda and the Taliban to paving roads and building schools. To imagine that the U.S.-led coalition can create a functioning economy and establish civilian and military bureaucracies through some “government in a box” highlights the ignorance and arrogance of our central planners in Washington.
Let’s hope that the landmark death of Osama bin Laden brings a swift end to our ongoing investment and sacrifice.
Wednesday Links
- Osama bin Laden’s death gives us a chance to end what might have become an era of permanent emergency and perpetual war.
- The Cold War ended–what are we doing in Korea?
- Two cheers for President Obama for ending eight (well, three) tax breaks to oil companies.
- Does Osama bin Laden’s death mean an end to U.S.-Pakistan relations?
Please join us next Tuesday, May 10 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a Cato Book Forum on America’s Allies and War: Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, by University of Mary Washington political scientist Jason W. Davidson. Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and Georgetown University international relations professor Charles Kupchan will join Professor Davidson in a discussion of the book and its themes, particularly U.S. relations with NATO allies, moderated by Cato director of foreign policy studies Christopher A. Preble. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by Monday, May 9 at noon Eastern. We hope you can join us in person, but we encourage you to watch online if you cannot attend personally.
Tuesday Links
- “Given America’s large-scale, long-term nation-building mission in Afghanistan, another chapter remains unfinished.”
- “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to refer to a government whose intelligence service assists military efforts by al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. troops in Afghanistan as an ‘ally.’”
- “Terrorists are not superhuman.”
- “Physicians must either make up for this shortfall by shifting costs to those patients with insurance — meaning those of us with insurance pay more — or treat patients at a loss.”
- Is America in a libertarian moment?
Monday Links
- Habeas corpus applies to anyone, citizen or not, in custody under American law, no matter what President Bush and President Obama decree.
- House Republicans’ cuts to the Department of Education, which will spend over $70 billion next year, didn’t even amount to $1 billion.
- “Regardless of whether Pakistan gets its way, its impudence in pushing Afghanistan to abandon America exposes the real balance of power in the region.”
- “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to refer to a government whose intelligence service assists military efforts by al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. troops in Afghanistan as an ‘ally.’”
- Here are five ways to cut military spending today without changing our strategic focus:
Appointment of Panetta and Petraeus Signals More of the Same
The report that Leon Panetta will be appointed Secretary of Defense, and Gen. David Petraeus will become the new CIA director, does not come as a huge surprise. But I worry that President Obama’s decision to fill these positions from within his administration signals an unwillingness to rethink U.S. foreign policy. Such a reevaluation is desperately needed.
Leon Panetta brings some experience in national security affairs to DoD, including his stints at CIA and on Capitol Hill, and as a member of the Iraq Study Group. His more relevant experience, however, may be as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration. Bob Gates effectively shielded the Pentagon from spending cuts, but that merely postponed the reckoning that Panetta will have to confront.
Considerable cuts, beyond even the $400 billion-over-12-year target that President Obama announced earlier this month, will require a fundamental rethinking of the military’s role, something that Gates was unwilling to do. It remains to be seen whether Panetta will tackle this challenge, or whether he will defer to others within the administration.
A new role for the military and the United States would shed unnecessary missions, and relieve some of the burdens on our troops. In all likelihood, such a change must be directed from the Oval Office, not the Pentagon.
The appointment of Petraeus to head the CIA is puzzling. I worry that the appointment of a military officer to lead a civilian agency raises questions about Obama’s faith in senior leaders from within the CIA who might have moved into the top role.
The agency has questioned some of the rosier predictions of impending success in Afghanistan, and I hope that Petraeus’s move to Langley doesn’t result in a change of those candid assessments. More generally, Petraeus has focused nearly all of his energies over the past nine years trying to perfect the U.S. military’s ability to fight wars that most Americans now wisely oppose. His insights into future opportunities and challenges is unclear. We should be putting these wars that sap our nation’s strength and undermine our security in the country’s rearview mirror. Instead, Petraeus appears committed to a long-term nation-building mission in Afghanistan, and others like it.
Protests in Afghanistan: Our Excuse to Get Out
General David Petraeus, the head of American forces in Afghanistan, has emphasized the importance of winning the “hearts and minds” of Afghans by treating them and their culture with respect. Pentagon officials may want to reexamine that assumption, but not for the reason you might think.
Evangelical pastor Terry Jones, author of the book Islam Is of the Devil and head of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, two weeks ago carried through on his promise to “stand up” to Islam and burn a Quran. In response, crowds demonstrated in cities across Afghanistan, with a mob in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif storming a United Nations compound, killing eight non-American aid workers and beheading two of them.
The message from the protests is clear: this is war. Nevertheless, moral ambiguities emerge. When backed by over 130,000 International Security Assistance Force troops and close to 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces operating under foreign command, how are civilian aid workers being perceived by local Afghans? In the minds of the protesters, what crimes were they committing if they genuinely believed that they were defending their religious traditions and customs from infidels occupying their country? None of this should imply that the Quran burning or the grisly violence meted out against innocent aid workers was justified. If anything, they epitomize the war in Afghanistan’s two major problems.
First, they illustrate the discrepancy between the war of perceptions being waged abroad and the fearsome “Islamic menace” that our elected leaders continue to exploit back at home. Second, and perhaps more important, these incidents demonstrate the danger of America trying to forcibly export its liberal values onto illiberal societies.
U.S. policymakers have long believed that people around the world both want to adopt America’s liberal values, institutions, and practices, and that they should embrace them because those values embody the most enlightened and most civilized way of thinking. This universalist belief was aptly summarized by President George W. Bush in his 2002 West Point speech: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place…When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations.”
This way of thinking is profoundly flawed. The notion that moral truths should be singularly interpreted implicitly denies the differences between cultures. As prominent political science scholar Kenneth Waltz writes: “The powerful state may, and the United States does, think of itself as acting for the sake of peace, justice, and well-being in the world. But these terms will be defined to the liking of the powerful, which may conflict with the preferences and the interests of others.”
To argue that moral truths and values are the same in every culture allows policymakers to avoid serious questions about the consequences of intervention, including the inherent constraints of operating within a foreign culture. Even simple issues like the burqa—a billowy garment that covers a woman from head to toe—are still misunderstood in America. Whatever one thinks about the burqa (a symbol of oppression, institutionalized intolerance, etc.), it is more than a mere item of clothing; it reflects the ultra-conservative societal norms in which Afghan women live, many of whom do not have the freedom to look and act however they want.
Many well-meaning Americans believe that the United States, with its commitment to individual rights, political and religious freedom, and the rule of law, has a unique role to play in advancing Afghan human rights But the freedom Americans champion also entails one’s freedom to dissent. Does the West have the moral authority to punish Afghan traditionalists who reject our imposition of social transformation? What happens when attempts to reshape Afghan customs and belief systems incite violent rebellions, as they recently did in Mazar?
Recent events in Afghanistan should be a wake-up call to how our 10-year occupation is actually being perceived. Rather than winning “hearts and minds,” America’s civilizing mission has become increasingly associated with a Western cultural invasion.
Monday Links
- “One of the first rules of negotiating is never to threaten to do something unless you are prepared to do it.”
- Policymakers and pundits assume the U.S. is so dominant that we’re prepared to fight multiple fronts at once, and that it won’t affect our security.
- Candidates for office should prepare to raise money, not rely on taxpayer subsidies.
- More market liberalization could help prepare Japan for any other natural disaster.
- Are Tea Party-backed Republicans prepared to go the distance on spending cuts?
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