By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 16, 2013
We remain a nation at peril, but are we still a nation at
war?
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama
signaled, yet again, that the war in Afghanistan is effectively over. Soon, in
fact, it will be over by any honest measure: The presence of American troops
will be halved to 34,000 in the coming months, and erased entirely by December
31, 2014. On this arbitrarily chosen date, the president claims, we will
“achieve our core objective of defeating the core of al-Qaeda.”
This was just rhetorical fluff. The core of al-Qaeda will
still be intact, even resurgent. It will simply have moved on to more
hospitable climes such as northern Africa — thanks in no small part to a
windfall of new arms from Libya, courtesy of Obama’s unprovoked, unauthorized,
and strategically disastrous war to topple the Qaddafi regime.
What, moreover, has Afghanistan got to do with “defeating
the core of al-Qaeda”? We have been told for years that al-Qaeda has virtually
no presence in Afghanistan. It has been a very long time since the mission of
our troops there was to defeat al-Qaeda’s core. For several years, their
mission has been incoherent: Prop up the ramshackle and often hostile sharia
government we have birthed in Kabul, while simultaneously staving off and
negotiating with the Taliban. You may think, as I do, that these are futile
objectives and that it is irresponsible to put our troops in harm’s way for
them. Or you may believe that, though difficult, they are worthy goals. One
thing you cannot credibly believe, though, is that these are the aims for which
we went to war in 2001.
It is essential to remember those aims because it is
they, and they alone, that determine whether we are still, constitutionally and
legitimately, a nation at war. That is a very real question. It is one we must
confront because on it hinges such crucial questions as whether the intensified
drone campaign — the subject of heated ongoing debate — is lawful.
Understand: Though war is political act, it is also a
formal legal reality. Its existence and legitimacy, in our constitutional
system, are up to Congress.
War is not a matter of rhetoric. Banter that “we remain a
nation at war” is no more meaningful than claptrap about being at “war” with
poverty or drugs. Many of us have long objected to the term “War on Terror”
exactly because it is rhetoric that ducks identification of an actual enemy. As
such, it invites such dubious mission creep as “Islamic democracy”–building in
Afghanistan and elsewhere. If, in going to war, you don’t focus on the defeat
of a concretely identified human enemy, all manner of foolishness can become
policy under the guise of defeating a rhetorical abstraction such as “terror.”
Nor is war an exercise in deductive reasoning. The nation
is not legitimately at war just because politicians and pundits can look around
and draw the conclusion that the United States has enemies in the world. Merely
to have enemies is not to be at war. We always have enemies — foreign countries
and factions that mean us ill. North Korea is our enemy, as is Hezbollah, but
we are not at war with them.
In the same way, the international jihadist network
spearheaded by al-Qaeda was our enemy before September 11, 2001. In fact, prior
to that infamous date, al-Qaeda repeatedly declared itself to be at war with
us. It even acted on these declarations by, for example, attacking our
embassies in east Africa in 1998 and the U.S.S. Cole as it docked in Yemen in
2000. Here, however, is the salient fact: We were not at war with al-Qaeda,
regardless of their jihad against us. This was unwise on our part, but that
does not make it any less true.
What changed after 9/11 was not our rhetoric or the
unremarkable fact that we had enemies. What changed, what took the nation to
war, was the formal Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress.
It was the 2001 AUMF, an act of Congress’s constitutional
war power, that vested the commander-in-chief with authority “to use all
necessary and appropriate force.” It was the 2001 AUMF that triggered combat
operations in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was then headquartered. The AUMF is
what rendered legitimate such wartime tactics as subjecting enemy combatants to
drone strikes, indefinite detention, and military commissions.
Moreover, because the AUMF spelled out no geographical
boundaries, it authorized combat operations anyplace in the world where the
enemy could be found. Here, however, is where things get fuzzy because of the
vast difference between our war rhetoric and what the AUMF actually says about
the enemy.
The enemy is not “terror.” And, contrary to popular
belief, the enemy is not even al-Qaeda. As I reiterated in last weekend’s
column, the AUMF does not proclaim an open-ended license to attack anyone
affiliated with al-Qaeda. In fact, the AUMF does not mention “al-Qaeda” at all.
Have a look at it, here. It defines the enemy as follows:
The commander-in-chief’s license to wage war is plainly
circumscribed by the 9/11 atrocities. Of course, that does not make the AUMF
what any sensible person would call “narrow.” After all, it trusts the
commander-in-chief to judge which “nations, organizations, or persons” were
complicit in the 9/11 operation — no additional congressional findings are
needed.
While one person’s judgment can be quite elastic, the
president’s need not be in order to make the AUMF extremely capacious. It is
broad on its own terms. For example, al-Qaeda is the organization that was
principally complicit in 9/11, and thus it may be attacked anyplace, anytime.
The AUMF also undoubtedly authorizes warfare against the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s
former host, even though the president, in his discretion, chooses not to
regard the Taliban as an enemy — indeed, our government has not even designated
the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization, much less declared war against
it. In addition, the AUMF would authorize war against Iran. The 9/11 Commission
all but expressly implicated the mullahs in the 9/11 plot, despite the
disinclination of President Obama, of President Bush before him, or of Congress
to connect those dots.
Nevertheless, as broadly as the 2001 AUMF could be
interpreted, it is not boundless. It clearly requires any use of force to be
rooted in 9/11. Only those who plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, or who
harbored those who did so, are legitimate targets.
Some claim there is more play in the AUMF’s joints. They
point out that the AUMF goes on to explain Congress’s desire “to prevent any
future acts of international terrorism against the United States.” But this is
an explanation of Congress’s motive for the authorization spelled out in the
AUMF; it does not expand that authorization. Of course it is true that, 9/11
aside, Congress does not want terrorists to attack us. But that does not alter
the fact that, in the AUMF, Congress permitted combat operations only against
terrorists culpable for 9/11, not against any terrorist who might ever attack
us. Even the reference to “future acts of international terrorism” seized on by
expansive constructionists is expressly limited to acts that might be committed
“by such nations, organizations or persons” complicit in the 9/11 attacks or in
the harboring of 9/11 attackers.
What does all this mean for drone attacks, the hot topic
du jour? In recent days, the debate over these targeted killings — and the
collateral killings that inevitably attend them — has strayed from its original
focus on the assassination of American citizens who collude with al-Qaeda.
Attention is now drawn to an equally urgent subject: the Obama administration’s
startling intensification of the drone campaign.
Obama may have campaigned in 2008 as the candidate who
would return us to the Clinton era, when terror attacks were deemed crimes
suitable for civilian prosecution rather than acts of war fit for military
response. As president, though, Obama has authorized hundreds more drone
attacks than did his supposedly war-mongering predecessor. In addition, he has
dramatically extended the frontiers of the campaign, which now include not only
Pakistan and Yemen but also a vast swath of the Maghreb.
Nor is that all. This week, Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy,
two former special-ops warriors, published Benghazi: The Definitive Report. If
the book is accurate, Obama delegated to John Brennan, his top counterterrorism
adviser and nominee for CIA director, unfettered authority to conduct a covert
war against terrorists in northern Africa — an enterprise conducted outside the
normal chain of command and without the knowledge of relevant American
diplomatic and intelligence officials.
Let’s put aside for the moment that, had George Bush done
something like this, only the peal of impeachment bells would have silenced the
media outrage. The pertinent question is: Who are the targets of this alleged
covert war?
Yes, there are heinous jihadists in Mali, Algeria, Libya,
Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and other African badlands. The problem is that the
vast majority of them had nothing to do with 9/11 and their connections to
al-Qaeda are murky at best. The problem is that, while some of them approve of
al-Qaeda’s worldwide jihad, most of them lack the means, and many the desire,
to attack the United States. Thus, according to at least some knowledgeable
military and intelligence veterans, our drones are catalyzing threats against
the United States that would not otherwise exist.
Do not get me wrong. We have seen the wages of abiding
safe havens for al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan and Sudan, the network set up shop,
trained recruits, and convinced many who’d been aggrieved locally to terrorize
globally. When al-Qaeda and its affiliates establish these redoubts, as they
are now trying to do in northern and eastern Africa, they plot mass-murder
attacks against the United States and American targets throughout the world.
That is why we must not allow that to happen anyplace. Naturally, we do not
want to make the threat against us worse than it is. But ignoring it is not an
option. The logic of jihadist ideology is global aggression, even if many of
its adherents are not quite so ambitious . . . at least for the time being. We
are therefore better off striking jihadist strongholds than refraining from striking
them. The additional enemies we may inspire are more than offset by those our
resolve discourages.
So President Obama is right to want our extraordinary
military capabilities trained on emerging jihadist hubs — and I applaud him for
recognizing that effective national security need not entail extravagant
nation-building projects that do not make us safer. But to have legitimacy,
drone attacks and other special-operations initiatives against our jihadist
enemies must be authorized by Congress. The Constitution calls for war to be
waged by the commander-in-chief, but it must be approved by the sovereign — and
that is not the president. It is the American people, acting through their
representatives in Congress.
Congressional authorization is not just what our law
demands, it is what sound policy dictates. Under the Obama administration’s
unilateral approach to war, on some days we are targeting jihadists in
Abbottabad and in villages along the Gulf of Aden, while on other days we are
somehow aligning with jihadists in Benghazi and Cairo (and maybe Aleppo).
The end of the war in Afghanistan is far from the end of
the threat to America. It is past time to specify who the enemy is. It is past
time to make clear that, while we have no desire to occupy foreign lands, we
are resolved — as a nation, not just as a presidential administration — to
pursue and defeat our jihadist enemies, wherever they are and however long it
takes.
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