Obama administration
I’ve long argued that the mission in Afghanistan has morphed from a limited, focused effort to damage al-Qaeda into a foolish and expensive–in both blood and treasure–nation-building crusade. But there is now evidence that we are spending billions of tax dollars and risking the lives of our soldiers to protect the biggest concentration of pedophiles in the world. Please read this article and then tell me if you think the war in Afghanistan is worth it.
The campaigns are well underway for the midterm congressional elections, and the vast quantities of hot air being vented could explain the extraordinarily high temperatures most the country has been experiencing this summer. One of the most irritating features of this campaign season is the apparent GOP assumption that Americans have been afflicted by collective amnesia. Republican officials and propagandists repeatedly savage the Obama administration for the ongoing Great Recession.
Some of their criticisms are valid. The 2009 prediction by the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors that the unemployment rate would be kept below 8 percent was spectacularly off the mark. The $700 billion “stimulus package” was a combination of the usual pork-barrel spending and utterly goofy spending schemes. And the apparent intentions of the administration and the Democrats in Congress to let most of the Bush tax cuts (one of the few good things that dreadful administration did) expire could well make an already very bad recession even worse.
But Republican partisans apparently want everyone to forget about when this recession began and who was running economic policy when it did. Obama’s policies have been unwise, at best, but he did inherit a colossal economic mess when he took office. Republicans act as though the recession began on January 20, 2009. But the plunge was underway well before then. The residential housing market started to collapse in 2006 and 2007, and the economy officially went into recession in December 2007. The financial system began to melt down in mid-2008, intensifying the downturn.
All of this happened with a Republican White House and GOP appointees in charge of the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. One would like to see at least a little acknowledgment of responsibility for the debacle instead of the current cynical, partisan effort to put all the blame on the Democrats and the Obama administration.
The Great Recession is a bipartisan economic tragedy. Republicans were primarily responsible for its onset, and the Democrats have managed to make a bad situation even worse.
Vice President Dick Cheney always impressed me as the most dangerous and vicious member of the Bush administration. He seemed to regard war as the answer to every foreign policy problem, and his contempt for the Constitution and civil liberties was legendary.
But his daughter, Liz Cheney, seems determined to outdo her father with respect to both of those repulsive attitudes. She is fast becoming my least favorite Cheney.
Her organization, which has become a prominent lobbyist for war with Iran, has now taken dead aim at supposed terrorist sympathizers in the Obama administration. Television ads are now running attacking the president for appointing officials to the Justice Department who had previously served as defense counsels–or even just peripheral members of defense teams–for accused terrorist suspects. Smearing those attorneys as the “Al Qaeda Seven,” the ad implies that such legal work should disqualify them from appointments to office.
That is a “guilt by association” attack that would have made Senator Joseph McCarthy (who was notorious for such tactics) blush. And it is an especially ugly tactic in this case. Lawyers are expected to be willing to defend even odious individuals, and they routinely do so. That is part of the code of their profession. It is appallingly unfair to hold that duty against them, much less to imply that they endorse the values of those individuals. Moreover, just because someone is accused of being a terrorist does not necessarily mean that the person is one. That’s why our justice system requires fair trials–and defense attorneys.
If the logic of Liz Cheney and her cohorts was correct, John Adams, America’s second president, should have been disqualified from ever holding any office of trust. After all, he was the defense lawyer for the British Redcoats involved in the Boston Massacre. Got an acquittal, too. Wonder what Liz and her smear artists have to say about that episode?
The good news is that decent conservatives have rebuked Cheney for her odious tactics. People should not have their patriotism or integrity impugned because they uphold the core principles of our legal system. That she would do so says all we need to know about Liz Cheney and her neoconservative associates.
President Obama will address the American people on Tuesday night regarding Afghanistan. Reports have leaked out over the past week that he will announce that he is sending additional troops into that quagmire. 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.
I am in the process of co-writing a book that includes a chapter on America’s disastrous war in Vietnam. I’m the first to acknowledge the hazards of equating one historical event with a development in a different setting and time period. In fact, the tendency of U.S. leaders to view every conflict in the world over the last 60 years through the prism of the failure to stem Nazi aggression in the 1930s has been a major cause of policy disasters like Vietnam and Iraq. And I don’t want to imply that what Obama is doing is exactly the same as the foolish strategy that the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations adopted in Southeast Asia during the 1960s. But there are a couple of very disturbing similiarities. 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. From the first client, Ngo Dinh Diem, to the last leader of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, American policymakers were frustrated by a parade of repressive, corrupt, and ineffectual political figures. Now, doesn’t that sound 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.
Instead of escalating, Obama should move to rapidly draw-down our forces and narrow the mission to one of trying to harrass Al Qaeda and keep it off balance. My colleague, Malou Innocent, and I published a Cato Institute White Paper, “Escaping the Graveyard of Empires,” describing how to achieve that goal without pursuing the futile objective of nation-building in Afghanistan.
I have a new article in the National Interest Online about the speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates during his recent visit to East Asia. His comments inadvertently underscored why U.S. foreign policy is such a mess. In one speech, he 1) made the North Korean nuclear crisis more dangerous, 2) greatly reduced the chances that China will exert itself to help solve the crisis, and 3) gave U.S. allies Japan and South Korea a green light to continue underinvesting in their own defense while free-riding on U.S. efforts. Other than that, it was a brilliant speech.
Gates is reputed to be the foreign policy “adult” in the Obama administration. If that’s true, we’re all in deep trouble.
Last week, I published an article in The National Interest Online about the folly of engaging in nation building in Afghanistan. Following the 9-11 attacks, I strongly supported military action in Afghanistan to punish al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that gave the terrorist organization a safe haven from which to plan that dastardly attack. But I also warned that we should not try to remake Afghanistan into a modern, stable, democratic country–in other words, try to pursue a utopian nation-building crusade. Yet, during the Bush years, we gradually drifted into exactly that sort of mission. And, unfortunately, the Obama administration seems to be escalating that effort.
The reality is that Afghanistan is not going to become a Central Asian version of Arizona–or even Arkansas–no matter how long we stay, how much money we spend, and how many American lives we sacrifice. The country is not called “the graveyard of empires” for nothing. Invaders from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union discovered that it was impossible to subdue that fractious society. Now, the United States seems determined to make the same foolish error.
We have to adopt realistic objectives. It is possible to further disrupt and weaken al Qaeda. But we must learn to treat that terrorist threat as a chronic, but manageable, security problem, not an overpowering threat that requires a definitive victory with a surrender ceremony (which isn’t going to happen anyway). And it certainly doesn’t require us to (somehow) get the people of Afghanistan to become good 21st century democratic capitalists committed to gender equality. That won’t happen for generations–if it ever does.
Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, we need an exit strategy, not the escalation strategy that the Obama administration is giving us. On September 14, my colleague Malou Innocent and I will be publishing a Cato Institute White Paper giving a detailed analysis of the current situation and outlining such an exit strategy. Please stay tuned.
President Obama has received considerable criticism because he has refrained from strongly endorsing the anti-regime street demonstrations in Iran. Much of that criticism has come from the same neoconservative geniuses, such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who brought us the Iraq debacle. My colleague Christopher Preble does an especially good job of showing why meddling, even verbally, in Iran’s internal political affairs would be a bad idea. Given America’s less-than-savory reputation with many Iranians ever since the CIA overthrew the country’s democratic government in 1953 and put the brutal, corrupt Shah back on the throne, a U.S. endorsement of the opposition would likely be the kiss of death.
The alleged election victory by hardline President Mahmoud Amadinejad was probably the result of fraud, and most Americans hope that the ongoing demonstrations ultimately oust the clerical regime. But if a revolution occurs, the Iranian people must do it for themselves. It would be both improper–and given the unfortunate history of U.S.-Iranian relations, counterproductive–for the U.S. government to meddle. So far, President Obama has struck the right cautious and balanced tone.
The situation in Pakistan is becoming increasingly ugly. Taliban forces and their Al Qaeda allies have gained control over significant chunks of Pakistan along that country’s border with Afghanistan. The feckless government in Islamabad, after unsuccessfully attempting an appeasement policy, has now apparently reversed course and is confronting the militants with a major military offensive. The bottom line is that Pakistan is an extremely fragile country with a growing radical Islamic insurgency. At the very least, those developments complicate America’s already beleaguered mission next door in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration is beefing-up the U.S. military presence. And we need to ponder a possible worst-case scenario: Pakistan completely unraveling and the militants getting control of that country’s nuclear arsenal. While the risk of Pakistan becoming the South Asian version of Somalia is still relatively remote, that possibility cannot be ruled out.
My colleague Malou Innocent recently published an excellent study on this extremely complicated situation. She spent several weeks last year in Pakistan as part of her research, and her analysis is the best relatively short treatment I’ve seen of this crucial and difficult issue.
I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton or her foreign policy views. In the past, she has far too often been an advocate of U.S. military intervention in situations that have nothing to do with the security or well being of this country. Her support for meddling in the civil wars in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s were prime examples, as was her later endorsement of the congressional measure authorizing President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq.
But she has made the correct decision regarding her first trip abroad as secretary of state. Instead of going to Europe, as most of her predecessors did, or going to the Middle East–a region that gets far too much attention from American foreign policy officials, she chose to go to East Asia. Secretary Clinton is in the middle of that trip, having already made a stops in Japan and Indonesia. Next, she travels to China and South Korea.
East Asia is already a crucial region for the United States, both diplomatically and economically, and it is likely to become more so in the coming decades. My colleague, Leon Hadar, makes a strong case for giving that region a higher priority on the U.S. foreign policy agenda instead of obsessing over every development in the Middle East. It’s refreshing to see signs that the Obama administration may be developing a more rational set of priorities.
The only other step Secretary Clinton should have taken was to put India on her itinerary. In many respects, that country should be as important as China–perhaps even more so–to the United States. Nevertheless, her first move as the steward of U.S. foreign policy has been a competent one.
While U.S. leaders focus on Afghanistan, Iran, and other problems in distant regions, there is an alarming security threat brewing right next door. Violence in Mexico, mostly related to the trade in illegal drugs, is spiraliing out of control. Even worse, it is apparent that the drug traffickers are winning their fight against the Mexican government. The situation on our southern border has grown so bad that even the Marines at Camp Pendleton in southern California are now barred from spending their leave time in neighboring Tijuana because the city is too dangerous.
The drug violence in Mexico, and how it is spilling across the border into our own country, is the subject of my new policy study for the Cato Institute. You can access it here.