Topic: Foreign Policy and National Security

Karzai’s Latest Outrageous Comment

By
Malou Innocent

Yesterday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai alleged that the United States and the Taliban are “working in concert to convince Afghans that violence will worsen if most foreign troops leave.” His accusation exposes a strange irony. Karzai not only supports U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, but also disparages that presence to evade his own failings. 

Since 2001, senior U.S. officials have tethered our military might to the sick man of Central Asia. In 2004, President George W. Bush pledged America’s “ironclad commitment” to help Karzai’s country succeed. In 2010, President Obama made clear that the U.S. role in Afghanistan “is a long-term partnership.” 

President Karzai codified those pledges last May by concluding the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America. Despite his history of hindering U.S.-backed anti-corruption investigations, denouncing the international community, and claiming the U.S. ferried Taliban to the north in order to spread violence, he eagerly signed an Agreement that commits the U.S. government to Afghanistan’s future. It provided for the possibility of a U.S. troop presence until 2024, and a long-term framework for training Afghan security forces and targeting al Qaeda. 

Washington’s devotion to nation building still holds fast despite Karzai’s inability to fulfill its lofty expectations. As former U.S. ambassador to Kabul Karl W. Eikenberry bluntly warned his superiors in November 2009, Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner.” 

Certainly, the United States is not blameless for Afghanistan’s downward spiral—it took responsibility back in 2001 to rebuild the war-ravaged country and then shifted its attention and resources in 2003 to invade and occupy Iraq. Yet, the endemically corrupt Karzai regime and its band of thugs and cronies are also culpable. 

Ample reporting on Afghan corruption need not be repeated here. More to the point, Karzai fails to appreciate the way in which his poor governance vindicates insurgent propaganda and drives many Afghans to fight. A widespread perception of the central government’s massive corruption delegitimizes the state and inspires the sense of injustice that makes the Taliban appear as an effective alternative. Apart from Karzai himself, Afghan police are notorious for perpetrating crimes they are supposed to be stopping, such as corruption, theft, kidnapping, murder, and child abuse. Meanwhile, the Afghan army, long hailed as the mission’s shining success story, is rife with factionalism and patronage networks that could splinter the institution along political and ethnic lines. Foreign policy planners in Washington overlooked the second- and third-order consequences of their attempts to build a strong central government that wields a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. 

As the Democratic majority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee admitted two years ago, “Foreign aid, when misspent, can fuel corruption, distort labor and goods markets, undermine the host government’s ability to exert control over resources, and contribute to insecurity.” (Emphasis mine.] 

Perversely, the corruption of the Afghan central government and the failures of the foreign-led nation-building project feed off one another in disturbing symbiosis. The Washington Post hasreported that foreign military and development spending provide roughly 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, fomenting fears that withdrawal will push the Afghan economy into depression. The alternative to popping that foreign aid bubble, some argue, would be to commit several hundred thousand troops and decades of attention, resources, and patience to transform Afghanistan’s deeply divided society into a stable, non-corrupt, electoral democracy. Of course, such success would hardly be guaranteed and assumes we possess the local knowledge as well as the cultural and religious legitimacy to operate indefinitely in a country notoriously suspicious of outsiders and largely devoid of central authority. 

Over twelve years of nation-building has had little success in creating an economically viable Afghan state, much less a self-sustaining Afghan security force. Indeed, nation building has propped up an erratic and unreliable regime whose behavior feeds the insurgency’s momentum. 

Policymakers must reject the flawed premise on which their policies rest. They must overcome their tendency to overestimate the strategic importance of a small, underdeveloped country to the narrower and more achievable goals of disrupting terrorist networks and preserving U.S. national security.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Rand Paul and Jim Webb on Congress’s Abdication of Foreign Policy Power

By
Benjamin H. Friedman

John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director displayed Congress’s disinterest in checking the president’s runaway security powers. Two months ago, when I wrote an article with the unwieldy title, “Will Obama’s Brennan Pick Shed Some Much Needed Light on Drones?” I wouldn’t have guessed that the answer would be yes; it will bestir Congress to finally force the administration to say clearly that it does not reserve the right to kill Americans at home with drone strikes, insofar as they are not engaged in combat. That statement came only thanks to whomever leaked the Justice Department’s summary memo on the topic, Brennan and Attorney General Eric Holder’s impolitic reluctance to articulate limits on the president’s power to kill Americans by calling them terrorists, and, of course, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) resulting filibuster. The Senate predictably left Brennan’s other sins against civil liberties mostly unexamined. 

Paul’s hard-won “toehold of constitutionality” isn’t much to cheer about, even if we add to the spoils the administration’s vague agreement to be more open about its legal rationale for placing people on kill lists. This minimal defense of civil liberties and congressional privilege is what got Republican senators like Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz, Jr. of Texas, who seem to support unfettered executive discretion to kill in the name of counterterrorism outside the United States, to support the filibuster. 

Even that was too much restraint for the neoconservative right. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) read on the Senate floor a Wall Street Journal editorial calling Paul’s effort a stunt meant to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids” and assuring us that those targeted by drones here or abroad will be “enemy combatants.” McCain and the Journal spectacularly miss Paul’s point: the issue is whether the president should make that designation, chucking due process rights, without being checked by another branch of government. 

As McCain amigo Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) noted, the Republican caucus’ flirtation with civil libertarianism seems a situational consequence of partisanship. The same goes for Democrats. Were it President McCain doing what Obama is, far more than two Democratic senators (Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Pat Leahy of Vermont) would have voted against Brennan. During his filibuster, Paul asked what happened to the Senator Obama of 2007, who opposed torture and war by executive fiat. Paul suggests that those views were products of Obama’s then circumstance: not being president. Even that may be too generous. As I wrote in a recent book review concerning Obama’s counterterrorism record, “even when he took office, there was ample evidence that his dovish positions would not outlast their political convenience.” 

We can hope, I suppose, that Paul’s stance will increase Congress’s willingness to assert its constitutional war powers. Although he did not, as far as I know, propose specific restrictions on the use of military force outside of the United States, Paul did complain that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks and those that harbored them has become a permanent warrant for almost limitless executive war powers, a kind of escape hatch from the Constitution opened by presidential utterance of the word “terrorist.”

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Parsing AG Holder on Domestic Targeted Killing

By
Julian Sanchez

As I wrote on Thursday, I’m not really losing sleep over the prospect of domestic targeted killing, mostly because it seems as though it would be so manifestly politically radioactive even within the intelligence community that I doubt it could be done secretly, and would almost certainly provoke a constitutional crisis if it became public. That said, as Marcy Wheeler notes, if we look closely at the precise wording of Attorney General Eric Holder’s response to Sen. Rand Paul disavowing any such presidential prerogative, it’s actually phrased in a way that seems calculated to preserve a fair amount of wiggle room:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question. “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

Now, it’s true that Senator Paul often recurred to the example of a drone “dropping a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience” during his Wednesday filibuster, but it seems weirdly specific to give an answer that is, read strictly, confined to weaponized drones, as opposed to snipers or poison or what have you. More importantly, it’s not entirely clear what Holder considers to be the parameters of “engaged in combat.” During Paul’s filibuster, the senator often agreed that it would clearly be permissible to use defensive lethal force against someone “actively engaged in combat”—shooting down a plane on a heading to crash into a target, or killing a terrorist in the middle of a shooting spree. There’s nothing particularly controversial about those cases: in the latter instance, we’d expect police to do as much without any presidential orders.

But since Holder conspicuously omitted the word “actively,” it isn’t clear that this is what he means. The public hasn’t seen the detailed legal memoranda underlying the CIA’s overseas drone program, and so we can’t really know what to make of Holder’s statement without knowing what the government thinks it means to be “engaged in combat” in this non-traditional conflict. Though the Obama administration has (symbolically) abandoned the use of the phrase “enemy combatant,” the Bush Justice Department argued in 2004 that a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda” might meet their definition of an “enemy combatant.” Could a citizen suspected of being involved in the planning stages of some future attack, then, be considered to be “engaged in combat” (perhaps even “actively”)?  Against the backdrop of the sort of examples Senator Paul was discussing, it’s presumably not what we’d intuitively think of, but then neither have the targets of our overseas drone attacks necessarily been “combatants” in the colloquial sense of one directly personally engaged in bearing arms. Again, until we see the memos and have a fuller understanding of the administration’s broader reasoning, isolated statements like Holder’s are difficult to interpret with much confidence.

Such definitional game-playing would not exactly be a novelty for this administration, which has apparently expanded the definition of “imminent threat” to cover people believed to be senior leaders of hostile groups, whether or not there is any evidence that they are actively engaged in planning some impending attack. And recall how another recent attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, managed to mislead Congress about President Bush’s warrantless wiretap program by silently redefining “the program the president has acknowledged” to mean “only the specific components he has already acknowledged,” even though these components had never been previously regarded as a separate surveillance program. So if this kind of hyperliteral close parsing of a few sentences seems like paranoid hairsplitting, it’s only because such word games appear to be par for the course when it comes to classified counterterrorism programs.

Do I think this means there’s some domestic assassination plan in the works? Certainly not. But I would not exactly be shocked if the attorney general had used a bit of careful lawyerly language to placate Senator Paul while leaving an opening for a future administration to claim that technically his disavowal of authority had been far narrower than it seemed.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Sequestration Is a Small Victory for Budget Hawks

By
Christopher A. Preble

The budget battles in Washington, D.C., are far from over. President Obama’s attempt to break the stalemate by reaching across the aisle and dining with GOP members two days in a row seems more about show than substance. 

The apparent lack of urgency to undo the cuts underscores what we knew all along: the world did not end under sequestration. Most of the cuts will be phased in over the next few months. The defense cuts amount to just 6.5 percent of total spending on national security (Pentagon base budget plus war costs). This is a pittance, and spending will still dwarf what we spent before 9/11. Those who claim that the cuts will undermine American security should explain how we managed to win the Cold War while spending much less, on average. (To learn more about proposals that would maintain a highly capable, but less costly, military, attend our event on March 14th.) 

There is still the possibility that most of this year’s cuts, or the caps on planned spending over the next decade, may not materialize. Congress could reverse the cuts in the future as part of a grand bargain. Or they could simply punt without one. Meanwhile, legislation is moving along that would allow the Pentagon and other agencies to implement the cuts with greater discretion across department programs. This is a good thing, potentially. Smarter cuts are desirable, but we should be on the lookout to ensure that Congress doesn’t simply legislate away any cuts, dumb or otherwise. 

Nonetheless, the fact that military spending actually declined is a small victory. But how will future battles play out? Are the neocons and their supporters in retreat? In a piece running today at Foreign Policy, I offer a cautionary note. Just because the fiscal hawks won this time doesn’t mean that they’ll win the next one, or the one after that: 

The defense contractors and special interests still have enormous firepower in Washington, and they’ve turned their attention to the “continuing resolution” that will fund the government for the remainder of the year. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives are single-minded and relentless. Their tenacity paid off in their bid to launch a war in Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, but failed to stop Chuck Hagel’s nomination and eventual confirmation as secretary of defense.

The budget fight matters even more. A $470 billion military is more than sufficient to fight the wars the United States truly needs to fight, but not the wars that the neocons want to fight. The next phase in the fight over the Pentagon’s budget should focus less on how much the United States spends on defense, but rather why it spends so much. If we are going to give our military less than it expected to have three or four years ago, we need to think about asking it to do less.

Read the full article here.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Tax and Budget Policy

Mr. Paul Goes to Washington

By
Julian Sanchez

C-SPAN footage of Rand Paul's filibusterAs Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged early on in his epic 13-hour speech Wednesday (highlights here), his decision to mount an old-fashioned, talk-till-you-drop filibuster of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director didn’t really have much to do with Brennan personally. But neither was it really, at a fundamental level, about the narrow question of whether the president can “drop a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience” as you sit sipping a latte on American soil. If any citizens were realistically worried about that prospect, Attorney General Eric Holder has (somewhat belatedly) answered that question in the negative, prompting Paul to declare victory on that front.

But as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman observes, the spectre of Predators over Starbucks actually served to spotlight the “extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year ‘war on terrorism’ ”—and to frame a much broader and more wide-ranging critique of that “perpetual war,” in which Paul charged that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities to an unaccountable executive branch. In Paul’s view, “we shouldn’t be asking [the president] for drone memos”—documents laying out the legal basis for the CIA’s targeted killing program, which the administration has finally, grudgingly deigned to provide to Congress, though not the American public—”we should be giving him drone memos.” As if to highlight the erosion of statutory checks on the president’s counterterror authority, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared that, after all, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed after 9/11 made no exception for actions “in the United States”—even though Congress had specifically rejected a request to include that phrase in the authorization.

The broadly positive reaction to Paul’s filibuster suggests, to me at least, that many Americans now fall outside the bipartisan Washington consensus that there’s little need for serious congressional scrutiny or debate when it comes to the War on Terror, and are relieved to hear that dissatisfaction echoed on the Senate floor. No longer as terrorized or shell-shocked as we were a decade ago, perhaps we’re becoming less willing to accept assertions that the public has no business knowing how and when the president may authorize secret killings in countries where we are not formally at war. If we want to get really radical, we may eventually begin to suggest there are proper constraints—if not constitutional, then at least moral—even on the killing of human beings who had the poor taste to be born in another country. We might question whether Americans are being well served when Congress spends less time debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act or the FISA Amendments Act than Senator Paul did (literally) standing on principle Wednesday night.

Is it absurd to fear, as some of Paul’s colleagues charged, that the president will begin launching drone strikes on American soil? Probably. But the point is precisely that we live under an administration so unwilling to acknowledge meaningful limits on what they may do in the name of national security that it was an exercise in tooth-pulling just to get a public disavowal of an absurd scenario that the government’s anemic targeted killing “standards,” taken to their logical extreme, would not appear to foreclose. The crucial message we should take from Paul’s marathon oration, then, may be this: If it’s absurd to pose the question that inspired his filibuster, surely it’s far more absurd that we’ve arrived, after a decade of complacency about government secrecy and unfettered executive discretion in the sphere of counterterrorism, at a point where the question would need to be posed.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Fred Kaplan on David Petraeus and Counterinsurgency

By
Christopher A. Preble

I have a new blog post up at US News and World Report discussing Fred Kaplan’s latest book, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, a terrific book about a very important subject. 

I’m thrilled to be hosting Fred at Cato in a few weeks. I’ve been a Kaplan fan for nearly two decades, since I first read his classic, The Wizards of Armageddon. I also thoroughly enjoyed Daydream Believers, about the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. It is an honor to be able to personally welcome him to Cato.

I’m particularly interested in the subject of his latest book: counterinsurgency (COIN). The discussion at Cato, which will also feature comments by Janine Davidson and Spencer Ackerman, hearkens back to several others that I’ve hosted or participated in. 

One in particular sticks out. Back in 2006, Cato published a paper on the American way of war by Jeffrey Record of the Air War College. I thought the paper was outstanding at the time, and, upon rereading it this week, I was struck by how much of what Jeff observed overlaps with a discussion about COIN that Petraeus hosted at Fort Leavenworth in February 2006 (the focus of my blog post at US News). He couldn’t know this at the time he was writing, of course, but it just so happens that many of Jeff’s questions and concerns about COIN were shared by many others within the national security establishment, including those who Gen. Petraeus invited to vet the COIN manual. (Those interested in the subject might also want to watch or listen to the event that we hosted with Jeff, Tom Ricks, and Conrad Crane, one of the principle authors of the COIN manual, FM 3-24.) 

Here are a few excerpts from the paper: 

Barring profound change in America’s political and military cultures, the United States runs a significant risk of failure in entering small wars of choice, and great power intervention in small wars is almost always a matter of choice. Most such wars…do not engage core U.S. security interests other than placing the limits of American military power on embarrassing display. Indeed, the very act of intervention in small wars risks gratuitous damage to America’s military reputation…. 

If this analysis is correct, the policy choice is obvious: avoidance of direct military involvement in foreign internal wars unless vital national security interests are at stake…. 

Avoidance of such conflicts means abandonment of regime-change wars that saddle the United States with responsibility for establishing political stability and state building, tasks that have rarely commanded public or congressional enthusiasm. 

Other elements of the discussion re: COIN were echoed in a paper that I coauthored with Ben Friedman and Harvey Sapolsky in 2008: 

The problem with counterinsurgency warfare is not that its theory of victory is illogical. If you understand the culture, if you avoid counterproductive violence, if you integrate civilians and make reconstruction operations a reward for cooperation, if you train the local forces well, if you pick your allies wisely, if you protect enough civilians and win their loyalty and more, you might succeed. But even avoiding a few of these ifs is too much competence to expect of foreign powers. That is why insurgencies in the last century generally lasted for decades and why the track record of democratic powers pacifying uprisings in foreign lands is abysmal…. 

Another reason Americans will struggle to master counterinsurgency doctrine is that it requires a foreign policy at odds with our national character… 

Americans have historically looked askance at the small wars European powers fought to maintain their imperial holdings, viewing those actions as illiberal and unjust. Misadventures like Vietnam are the exceptions that make the rule. It is no accident that U.S. national security organizations are not designed for occupation duties. When it comes to nation building, brokering civil and ethnic conflict, and waging counterinsurgency, we are our own worst enemy, and that is a sign of our lingering common sense. 

In The Insurgents, Fred Kaplan, summarizing a set of questions and comments from those who reviewed the COIN manual before it was published, asks “whether counterinsurgency was even possible? The question,” Kaplan writes, “had two parts. Was the U.S. Army up to the task? And, at least as uncertain, were the American people?” 

I think we know the answer now, and we could have known it in 2006, before the Iraq surge, or in 2008, well before the Afghan surge. Instead, we chose to believe the opposite of what history and logic taught us. 

What do we have to show for it?

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un: Basketball Fan, Closet Liberal?

By
Doug Bandow

KGB director Yuri Andropov was a jazz aficionado and collector of abstract art, so he must be a liberal, it was said. Great change was expected when he took over as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982. 

Well, no. It turns out that he did not use the KGB as a clever cover for his secret liberal soul. Brutal repression continued apace. The U.S.S.R. had to wait for Mikhail Gorbachev, who did have a secret liberal soul. 

Much the same blather continues to be spread about North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. After all, he attended prep school in Switzerland. He likes Disney characters. And he is a fan of American basketball. 

Not just any basketball player. According to the BBC: 

Mathew Syed, [London] Times sports columnist, told the Today programme: “When I heard that [Dennis] Rodman had gone to North Korea, I was genuinely shocked.  

But it turns out that Kim Jong-un is a lifelong fan, apparently enjoyed it enormously, and sport being used as a potential tool for political rapprochement has a very long history.” 

So forget “ping-pong diplomacy” with Mao’s China. Dennis Rodman is the vehicle for the Kim dynasty as it inaugurates democracy, establishes capitalism, and protects human rights. Perhaps Rodman and Kim will share the next Nobel Peace Prize. 

It would be a wonderful story. But as yet there is no hint of serious reform in the North. Kim is younger and more open, attending events with his attractive, designer-handbag-toting wife. However, the labor camps remain full, controls on the border with China have been tightened, rumored economic reforms remain just rumors, and Pyongyang has moved ahead with rocket and nuclear tests. 

Reform may—indeed, must—eventually come. But in the meantime it is important to remember the essential character of the North Korean regime. The Kim family empire’s power is built upon a comprehensive system of pervasive discrimination and repression built on social classification, through which entire extended families are punished for an individual’s transgressions. Like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Kim’s North Korea is a gulag state, with citizens facing punishment and death for any number of transgressions. For decades Pyongyang even turned kidnapping into state policy, both enticing and forcing other peoples into what probably is the worst, most brutally repressive system on earth.  

Kim Jong-un likes basketball. Unfortunately, that does not make him a reformer, but only a dictator who happens to like basketball.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

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