Kudos to Jeff Miron, Andres Martinez and Fareed Zakaria for their decisive win in the Intelligence Squared Debate, Is America to Blame for Mexico’s Drug War?

For related Cato work, go here and here.

Barack Obama first became a credible presidential candidate on the basis of his antiwar credentials and his promise to change the way Washington works. But he has now made both of George Bush’s wars his wars. The Washington Post’s front-page analysis began, “President Obama assumed full ownership of the war in Afghanistan on Tuesday night…” The cover of the tabloid D.C. Express was even more blunt.

Speaking of Iraq in February 2008, he said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” Responding to Hillary Clinton’s criticisms in March 2008, he said, “I will bring this war to an end in 2009, so don’t be confused.” Now he is promising to end the Iraq war in 2011, and to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in that year. Not the change we hoped for.

President Obama promises that after all this vitally necessary and unprecedented federal spending, he will turn his attention to constraining spending at some uncertain date in the future. And now he says that he will first put more troops into Afghanistan, and then withdraw them at some uncertain date in the future (“in July of 2011,” but “taking into account conditions on the ground”). Voters are going to be skeptical of both promises to accelerate and then put on the brakes later.

Of course, John McCain thinks that even a tentative promise to get out of this war after a decade is too much. “Success is the real exit strategy,” he says. And if there’s no success? Then presumably no exit. Antiwar voters may still find a vague promise of getting the troops out of Afghanistan three years after the president’s inauguration preferable to what a President McCain would have promised.

But as Chris Preble wrote yesterday, this increase of 30,000 troops — or 40,000 — is not going to win the war. The U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine says that stabilizing a country the size of Afghanistan would require far more troops than anyone is willing to invest. So why not declare that we have removed the government that harbored the 9/11 attackers, and come home?

The real risk for Obama is becoming not JFK but LBJ — a president with an ambitious, expensive, and ultimately destructive domestic agenda, who ends up bogged down and destroyed by an endless war. Congress should press for a quicker conclusion to both wars.

There are two things that President Obama’s plan won’t do: win the war, or end the war.

While all Americans hope that the mission in Afghanistan will turn out well, the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine says that stabilizing a country the size of Afghanistan would require far more troops than the most wild-eyed hawk has proposed: about 600,000 troops. An additional 30 to 40,000 troops isn’t just a case of too little, too late; it holds almost no prospect of winning the war. Accordingly, this likely won’t be the last prime-time address in which the president proposes sending many more troops to Afghanistan; my greatest fear is that this is only the first of many.

But we shouldn’t just commit still more troops. President Obama should have recognized that the goals he set forth in March went too far. A better strategic review would have revisited our core objectives and assumptions. It would have focused on a narrower set of achievable objectives that are directly connected to vital U.S. security interests—chiefly disrupting al Qaeda’s ability to do harm—and that would have left the rebuilding of Afghanistan to Afghans, not Americans. President Obama’s national security team seems not to have even considered this course. Instead, the administration focused on repackaging the same grandiose strategy.

Secretary of Defense Gates fixed on the dilemma several weeks ago when he pondered aloud: “How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this is not open-ended?”

It turns out you can’t. The president’s decision to deepen our commitment to Afghanistan while simultaneously promising an exit is ultimately absurd on its face.

I’d be surprised if any foreign policy analyst would bet his or her next paycheck that this is going to work. I wouldn’t.

Reports have leaked out over the past week that President Obama will announce that he is sending additional troops into Afghanistan. The only question seems to be whether he will send 30,000, 40,000 or some number in between. That is, frankly, not a very important issue.

And for all of his talk about “off ramps” for the United States if the Afghan government does not meet certain policy targets or “benchmarks,” the reality is that he is escalating our commitment. Since Obama has repeatedly asserted that the war in Afghanistan is a war of necessity, not a war of choice, his talk of off ramps is largely a bluff—and the Afghans probably know it.

There are obvious hazards in equating one historical event with a development in a different setting and time period, but there are a couple of very disturbing similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan. In both cases, U.S. leaders opted to try to rescue a failing war by sending in more troops. And in both cases, Washington found itself desperately searching for a “credible” leader who could serve as an effective partner in the war effort.

The United States never found such a leader in Vietnam, and was frustrated by a parade of repressive, corrupt, and ineffectual political figures. That experience sounds more than a little like the problem the Bush and Obama administrations have encountered with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government. That fact alone suggests that our Afghanistan mission is not likely to turn out well.

1) Commandant of the Marine Corps announces part of justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan: “where we have gone, goodness follows.” Pat Lang is displeased.

2) Glenn Greenwald observes that in Foreign Policy magazine’s survey of leading public intellectuals who write about foreign policy, the United States is tied with Somalia and Iran for second place in the category “Most Dangerous Country in the World.”

3) Afghanistan is an ideologically cross-cutting issue. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D‑OH) praises Cato’s Afghanistan study on Fox News’ On the Record, saying

…I’m against any further taxes to pay for this war. But I think it has to be pointed out, this isn’t a left-right issue. I mean, here’s the Cato Institute, hardly a left-wing organization, wrote a piece called “Escaping the Graveyard of Empires,” and they have a plan, and I’ve met with them, that gets us out of Afghanistan, with advisers and a new approach to intelligence and also a new drug policy.

Meanwhile, the liberal Center for American Progress has produced a statement on Afghanistan that offers some empty rhetoric about an exit strategy but contains no actual plan–or even a call for a plan–for exiting. Instead, their proposal for when to leave is limited to calling for a multinational effort that merely will “have all Afghan forces in the lead within four years, or the 12-year mark of our engagement.” CAP is also offering a pretend plan to cut the Pentagon budget, urging Obama to spend more than $600 billion on defense for each of the next several years.

Two weeks ago in Defense News, I argued that America’s alliances are growing increasingly detached from American security interests. With reference to Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ visit to the newly-minted government in Japan, I wrote that

after imploring [new Japanese PM Yukio] Hatoyama to continue Japan’s minuscule contribution to the war in Afghanistan and not to reconsider the deal to realign U.S. forces in Japan, Gates was asked whether the U.S. military role in Japan might be scaled back. Offering the obligatory reference to the countries’ “shared interest” in regional security, Gates admitted that “the primary purpose of our alliance from a military standpoint is to provide for the security of Japan … It allows Japan to have a defense budget … of roughly 1 percent of GDP.”

This is an excellent reason why the Japanese should support the alliance, but it raises the question of why U.S. taxpayers should want to pick up the tab for Japan’s security.

[caption align=right]

MCAS Futenma[/caption]

But the Hatoyama government seems intent on reopening old wounds. Aside from its insistence on renegotiating the Futenma agreement on shifting US forces around in Japan, now comes the news that the just-elected Democratic Party (DPJ) is going to (*ahem*) open the kimono and reveal “evidence of a decades-old secret pact between Tokyo and Washington that allowed U.S. ships and aircraft to carry nuclear weapons on stopovers in Japan.”

The idea of a Japanese government breaking Japanese law in order to allow American military vessels to carry nuclear weapons in Japan is wildly unpopular among Japanese. In large part, this is a pretty transparent move by the DPJ to stick it to the now out of power Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) by tying them to illegal and secretive practices that huge majorities of the Japanese public oppose.

But the broader point is that for those of us who have been advocating a larger role in Asia for Japan and a smaller one for the United States, the increasingly independent nature of the new DPJ government ought to be seen as a feature, not a bug. If the Japanese are really feeling their oats and aren’t too excited at continuing the LDP’s lockstep alliance with the United States, more power to them. If they want fewer US troops in Japan, terrific. We’re militarily overextended as it is and have serious economic problems to deal with. The Bush administration took some baby steps in this direction. The Obama administration should keep the ball rolling.

American officials ought to be quietly thinking about how to use the developments in Japan to start handing off responsibility for defending Japan to the Japanese government.

Climb aboard the TARDIS campers, we’re going to take a magic YouTube voyage to a strange parallel universe, very much like ours, except Barack Obama sports a dashing goatee and… Sorry, what’s that? Not a parallel universe, you say? August of 2007, you say?

Wait, that can’t be right. Because right around 20 seconds in, Barack Obama says that under his administration, there would be “no more National Security Letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.” That’s not who we are, he says! Not what’s needed to fight terrorists, he says!

And yet his Justice Department has quietly but steadfastly fought any effort to limit the use of National Security Letters. When Democratic lawmakers attempted to require that these administrative subpoenas, issued by FBI agents without judicial supervision, be issued only to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or foreign agents or people they’d been in contact with—or if necessary to obtain records relevant to the activities of suspected terrorists in the interest of identifying specific individuals—the administration worked behind the scenes to rally Republicans and Blue Dogs against those changes.

You know, a few more years like this, I’m liable to run right out of Hope™.