GETTING INTO AND OUT OF AFGHANISTAN PART II: WAS THERE A BETTER WAY?

                 

As the headlines screamed the story of

America’s messy exit from Afghanistan, we decided we should focus on how the United States got involved there in the first place. What lessons can we learn from two decades there and the ultimate failure that precipitated the sloppy exit?

Our last post began that examination when we looked at the legal mechanisms for committing the United States to war and the history of skirting them. We noted that Congress doesn’t declare war anymore, even though the constitution gives it, and it alone, that power. We looked at the 1973 War Powers Act and its purpose in reigning in executive

power to make war without legislative authority. We observed how it’s been ineffective in preventing presidents from starting and

waging wars on their own.  We closed by suggesting Afghanistan perhaps demonstrated how presidents have violated the constitution and that statue.

War Fever

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror

attacks on New York and Washington, Americans were angry.  They wanted retaliation against those responsible. U.S. intelligence quickly pinned

the blame on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorists operating from safe havens provided by the Taliban in Afghanistan. President George W. Bush decided the U.S. would launch military operations against that regime.

Bush didn’t seek a declaration of war against Afghanistan. He asked for, and got, a resolution from Congress called an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It targeted anybody and everybody responsible for September 11. It passed Congress with one dissenting vote, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

That AUMF imposed no time or geographic limits. It’s still in effect. It’s been used to justify military action in all kinds of places. A lot happened that was never contemplated in either the language or the intent of that AUMF. We ask now if Bush violated the constitution and/or the War Powers Act in starting and prosecuting the Afghanistan war. What about the two presidents – Barack Obama and Donald Trump – who followed him and continued the war?

The Start

Bush and the legislators who supported the AUMF didn’t say much about how the president could use it, except that it provided the tools for avenging the deaths of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11. The public, as measured by polls, overwhelmingly supported use of military force in Afghanistan. Hardly anyone said anything except, “Go for it!”

The War Powers Act never entered into the discussion because of the AUMF. Even if Congress hadn’t declared war, even if Bush didn’t stop military action after 60 days, the AUMF seemingly gave him authority for whatever he thought necessary. The problem was that the war dragged on and on and the issues of why we went there and remained there became embroiled in the deadly combination of politics and patriotism.

Nation Building

After a while, some political leaders

questioned what the United States was doing in Afghanistan and how long we should stay. Joe Biden, as Obama’s vice president, argued that once the United States captured and killed Bin Laden, no reason existed for a continued American presence.  Among

Obama’s senior advisors, only Biden took that position. The rest either thought American interests, or Obama’s political fortunes, or both required staying. Let no president, especially a Democratic one, stand accused of being unpatriotic about U.S. military involvement in a war.

It became obvious the U.S. role was no longer avenging the September 11 attacks, or even deterring future attacks, given how the American military degraded Al Qaeda’s terrorism capacity. No, the United States became engaged in a massive nation building exercise. We tried making Afghanistan, a backward, tribal county with no history of a stable, central government, into a western-style democracy. For some Americans the war became a crusade for Afghan women and shielding them from the Taliban’s brutal interpretation of Islamic law.

It Wasn't Working

Gradually American public opinion soured on

the Afghanistan war – indeed on foreign interventions generally. Donald Trump got elected president – unexpectedly – for many reasons. One was that he pledged he’d end what he called “stupid wars” that were really about nation building. Some feared Hillary Clinton wasn’t on board with that. It may have been another of the factors that sealed her fate.

As Trump’s term wore on, he became increasingly determined to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. He too likely had concerns about the political price of an exit that might look very ugly. Trump, therefore, may simply have preferred leaving the departure to his second term, or his successor if he lost in 2020. Regardless, the public wanted out. Biden ran for president as the anti-Trump, but the two agreed the time for ending American presence in Afghanistan had come.

The way the U.S. got into Afghanistan played a role in how the country came to see the war. We got in amidst the fever generated by September 11. We accomplished the things Americans saw as reasonable objectives – catching Bin Laden and preventing Afghanistan from being used as a staging ground for attacks on the American homeland. With those done, it was time to go.

                                                      

Neither the AUMF nor the common understanding of American purpose in Afghanistan included nation building. We never debated that in the halls of Congress or on cable television, the place these things play out now. Because there was no such debate,many Americans finally saw little or no point in the war. Perhaps if we’d set limited objectives and stuck to them, we could have had a better entry and a better exit.