The Cato Institute

There’s No Military Solution for Afghanistan

Afghans have endured 40 years of uninterrupted war, and there is no plausible argument that war will soon end…

In a new paper, a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan argues that America’s longest war is unwinnable, in part because Afghanistan is stuck in a cycle of trauma and violence brought about by four decades of uninterrupted conflict.

Erik Goepner, Cato visiting scholar and retired U.S. Air Force colonel whose assignments included unit commands in Afghanistan and Iraq, rigorously analyzed the impact that 40 years of uninterrupted war has had on the population of Afghanistan.

He contends that the country is caught in a vicious cycle whereby war causes trauma, which drives more war. Goepner concludes that there is little America can do to substantially improve the situation in Afghanistan, and recommends America withdraw its military forces. In addition, any future military planning and intelligence estimates should consider the state of a population’s mental health.

In order to statistically measure the level of trauma within the country, Goepner created the “Trauma Index,” which takes into account traumatic events in the form of torture, rape, death, and other atrocities associated with war.

Unsurprisingly, the average Afghan has experienced extremely high-levels of trauma. An Afghan adult has experienced seven traumatic events, on average, compared to one to two for a European and one to three for an American adult. As a result of the trauma caused by persistent and pervasive violence, Afghans have a post-traumatic stress disorder rate of 50 percent, by some estimates.

The mental illness, substance abuse issues, and diminished impulse control that stems from trauma have resulted in an Afghan society in which violence has been normalized. “Making matters worse,” Goepner writes, “Afghans have no real opportunity to receive professional care. Researchers have reported that Afghanistan’s mental health services are ‘nonexistent,’ that there is an ‘acute shortage’ of qualified providers, and that the general situation is one in which ‘chronic mental illness has been left unattended in Afghanistan for decades.’”

Goepner also discusses additional drivers of conflict in the country. He argues that ineffective security forces, low opportunity costs for rebel recruitment, and sanctuary for rebels in neighboring Pakistan create the “opportunity for rebellion,” while grievances against the corrupt and incompetent government and financial incentives from the illicit opium trade provide the motivation to rebel. Goepner contends that for the United States to help the situation in Afghanistan it must remove its military footprint and instead pursue policies that incentivize a more-effective, less-corrupt Afghan government.

Goepner succinctly summarizes the challenges facing Afghanistan, writing that “Thanks to 40 years of uninterrupted war, Afghans suffer from extremely high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses, substance abuse, and diminished impulse control. Research shows that those negative effects make people more violent toward others. As a result, violence can become normalized as a legitimate means of problem solving and goal achievement, and that appears to have fueled Afghanistan’s endless war. Thus, Afghanistan will be difficult, if not impossible, to fix.”

Learn more…

Weakening the Constitution to Go to War in Syria is a Terrible Idea

The Constitution is supposed to make it difficult for a President to take the U.S. to war. Why would Congress want to make it easier?

Despite President Trump’s calls during the campaign to pull back from the Middle East and more recent statements that he’s ready pack up and go home from Syria “very soon,” he nonetheless ordered missile strikes in Syria, ostensibly in response to reports that Assad killed civilians with chemical weapons.

President Trump’s announcement that the United States, France and Britain had launched airstrikes against Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack might have surprised the people who listened to him campaigning in 2016, when he repeatedly critiqued “stupid” Middle Eastern interventions.

Since entering office, President Trump has reversed course on foreign policy, and he evidently now shares the assumption that America must do something in response to atrocities in Syria — a wholehearted embrace of the Washington bias toward action.

In this, President Trump and his predecessor have something in common: Both he and President Obama came into office promising to change America’s foreign policy, but when faced with crises, both yielded to pressure to intervene. This bias toward action is one of the biggest problems in American foreign policy. It produces poorly thought-out interventions and, sometimes, disastrous long-term consequences.

President Trump’s previous strikes in Syria garnered bipartisan praise from the Washington establishment, praise that the president craves. Yet military action in Syria will not benefit national interests, and may draw the U.S. further into a quagmire there is no easy route out of.

Two days after President Trump declared “Mission Accomplished” on the latest round of missile strikes against Syria, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled legislation intended to reassert Congress’s relevance to the wars we fight. But the new Authorization for the Use of Military Force, introduced by Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, and the Democrat Tim Kaine, may end up doing the opposite.

Senator Kaine is right that, as he said in a speech about the bill, “for too long Congress has given presidents a blank check to wage war.” The 2001 authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks and aimed at the perpetrators of those attacks, has done just that. Three presidents in a row have warped its limited authority into an enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.

The Corker-Kaine resolution won’t bring an end to the Forever War; it will institutionalize it. Instead of ratifying war powers that three presidents in a row have seized illegally, Congress should repeal — and not replace — the 2001 legislation.

In authorizing the use of force against a list of terrorist organizations and their affiliates, the bill states that it “establishes rigorous congressional oversight,” “improves transparency” and ensures “regular congressional review and debate.” Such transparency requirements are an improvement over the status quo. But the bill also turns the constitutional warmaking process upside down.

Our Constitution was designed to make war difficult, requiring the assent of both houses and the president. The bill essentially changes that by merely requiring “regular congressional review” of presidential warmaking and requires reauthorization every four years; meanwhile, choosing new enemies, in new countries, is the president’s call, unless Congress can assemble a veto-proof majority to check him.

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The Forgotten Anniversary: September 14th, 2001

After 16 years of war, it’s time to reckon with the less-appreciated anniversary of September 14, 2001, when Congress gave the President a relatively open-ended power to make war…

Over the last decade and a half, we’ve heard over and over again that “September 11th changed everything”—but maybe September 14 was the pivotal date. 

Sixteen years ago today, Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Aimed at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and those who “harbored” or “aided” them, the AUMF has been transformed into an enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.  

Two-thirds of the House members who voted for the 2001 AUMF and three quarters of the Senate are no longer in Congress today. But judging by what they said at the time, the legislators who passed it didn’t think they were committing the US to an open-ended, multigenerational war; they thought they were targeting Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Undeclared wars and drive-by bombing raids were hardly unknown before 9/11. But most of the military excursions of the post-Cold War era were geographically limited, temporary departures from a baseline of peace.

Barack Obama left office as the first two-term president in American history to have been at war every single day of his presidency. In his last year alone, U.S. forces dropped over 26,000 bombs on seven different countries. Seven months into his presidency, Donald Trump has almost certainly passed Obama’s 2016 tally already — all under the auspices of the AUMF.

The AUMF Congress passed in 2001 still serves as legal cover for current wars we fight in seven countries. War is now America’s default setting; peace, the dwindling exception to the rule.

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Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama Leaves a Legacy of War

President Obama will leave office as the first two-term president in American history to have been at war every day of his presidency, having dropped over 25,000 bombs on seven countries in 2016 alone….

As a young state senator in 2002, Obama gave an antiwar rally speech railing against the “dumb,” “rash” rush to war in Iraq. As a presidential candidate five years later, he promised to “turn the page on the imperial presidency” and usher in “a new dawn of peace.” In a speech to US troops last month, he denounced the “false promise” that “we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs,” and piously proclaimed that “democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war.”

And yet, 2008’s “peace candidate” has launched two undeclared wars (in Libya and against ISIS), ordered 10 times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush — including the remote-control execution of an American citizen, and, this summer, bombed six different countries just over Labor Day weekend.

By the time Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he’d already launched more drone strikes than “war president” Bush managed during his two terms. 

It is Obama who is largely responsible for warping the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—passed three days after 9/11 to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban—into an enabling act for endless war, anywhere in the world.

Where Bush secured congressional authorization for the two major wars he fought, Obama made perpetual warfare the new normal, and the president the ultimate “decider” in matters of war and peace.

Alas, political tribalism warps people’s perceptions of basic reality, convincing partisans they’re entitled to their own facts.

Even during the heyday of resistance to the Vietnam War, the criticism became more intense after Republican Richard Nixon took over the White House than it had been under Democrat Lyndon Johnson. There was far more criticism of Republican George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War than there was of Democrat Bill Clinton’s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (a distressing number of prominent liberals even found reasons to praise Clinton’s military crusades in the Balkans).

Left-wing groups mounted a fairly serious effort to thwart Republican Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But when Democrat Obama escalated U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and led a NATO assault to remove Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi from power, the reaction was very different.  Except for a few hard-left organizations, the sounds coming from the usual supposed anti-war liberal quarters were those of crickets. Likewise, there has been little push-back to Obama’s gradual return of the U.S. military presence in Iraq or the entanglement of the U.S. military in Syria.

With Trump’s inauguration near, Obama has described the transfer of presidential power as ”a relay race” where he’ll pass the baton to his successor. In private, he’s occasionally used a more ominous metaphor: leaving “a loaded weapon” behind for the next president.

And, now, Obama will pass that weapon on to Donald J. Trump, a man he’s flatly declared “unfit” for the office — someone who can’t be trusted with a Twitter account, let alone the nuclear launch codes.

Learn more….

Is China the Fix to North Korea’s Nuclear Obsession?

The increasingly unpredictable and confrontational regime in North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capability and launch a series of provocative missile tests. The traditional carrot-and-stick approach of ratcheting up sanctions while holding out the option of diplomatic engagement has failed. Policymakers in Washington need a new direction…

In his new study, Will China Solve the North Korea Problem?, Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow argues that, in order to solve the world’s most dangerous flashpoint, Washington must persuade China to use its leverage over North Korea and back an allied denuclearization deal.

China is North Korea’s only ally, most important trading partner, and provides the North with up to 90 percent of its energy, 80 percent of its consumer goods, and 45 percent of its food supply. Only with China’s full cooperation can economic pressure on Pyongyang be effective.

The challenge is convincing Beijing that it is in China’s interest to solve the North Korea problem. In order to do that, the U.S. must reassure the People’s Republic on several strategic fronts. First, one of the primary reasons China continues to prop up the North Korean regime is to maintain a buffer state between Chinese territory and a strong U.S. security ally in which tens of thousands of U.S. troops are based. Washington should make clear to Beijing its intention to disengage militarily once the Korean problem is solved.

Next, the U.S. should work with South Korea and Japan to develop a comprehensive offer to the North that takes China’s strategic concerns into account. The offer should include a peace treaty, denuclearization, diplomatic recognition, end of sanctions, participation in international agencies and forums, economic aid, removal of U.S. troops from the South, increased inter-Korean contacts, and discussion of reunification.

If these compromises fail to impel China to pressure the North, Washington should indicate that further expansion of Pyongyang’ s atomic arsenal may lead to proliferation in Japan and South Korea. But China sees proliferation in North Korea, never mind South Korea and Japan, as harmful to its interests, so there is hope for further cooperation.

Sanctions, international isolation, and occasional diplomatic negotiations with North Korea have failed to moderate the regime or to solve the decades-long stalemate on the Korean Peninsula. The key to success is China, but the United States must be willing to think outside the box to incentivize serious cooperation from Beijing.

“The incoming Trump administration appears ready to begin its relations with China on a confrontational note, threatening a trade war and upending four decades of dealings with Taiwan,” Bandow says. “Yet Washington and Beijing have shared interests, including keeping the Korean peninsula non-nuclear. However, winning China’s cooperation will require compromise. If President Donald Trump follows his predecessor in simply demanding Beijing’s assistance, he is likely to get the same result: failure.”

Read the study…

Remembering the Anti-War Movement

47 years ago today, the largest anti-war protest in American history took place…

On November 15, 1969, over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully in Washington D.C. to call for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

Almost five decades later, U.S. forces are engaged in active conflict in at least 6 countries, ranging from the well-known (Iraq; Afghanistan) to the largely invisible (Somalia; Yemen). Between January and March 2015, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to over 80 countries. Although many of these deployments focused on training exercises or advisory roles, it is an astounding measure of the scope of the U.S. military’s involvement around the world. 

What happened to the anti-war movement?

The public often seems blissfully unaware of America’s wars, reflecting a blurring of the line between war and peace. However, the sentiments behind that historic protest carry on today, though partisanship sometimes colors how passionate Americans are about ending needless wars…

Read on….

Fabricated Myths about War

“Americans rarely see the horror and savagery of the wars being fought in their name. The public—right or wrong—could care less about war; and our military and political elites have incentives for withholding the realities of war from the public.”

What War Does to Our Society

“Assessments of war should go beyond critiques of its political and geostrategic ramifications; they should also extend to the various ways that war affects our society and public more generally.”

PODCAST: Partisanship and Anti-War Sentiment

“Where did the anti-war movement go?”

How Partisanship Killed the Anti-War Movement

“What lessons can be learned from the collapse of the post-9/11 anti-war movement?”

VIDEO: Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism

“Conservatives love war, empire, and the military-industrial complex. They abhor peace, the sole and rightful property of liberals. Right? Wrong.”

Why Are FBI Agents Trammeling the Rights of Antiwar Activists?

“The FBI’s surveillance of antiwar activists dates back to at least World War I…No FBI agent or manager has ever been fired or prosecuted for violating the constitutional rights of those individuals or groups wrongly surveilled, harassed or charged.”

Don’t Make Women Register for the Draft. Just End Draft Registration for Everyone.

“When it comes to the draft, or any lingering vestige of it, it’s time for Congress to end it, not mend it.”

Isolationist or Imperialist?

“On foreign policy, Trump’s statements throughout the campaign have been profoundly incoherent, ranging from more traditional hawkish Republican views on issues like the Iran deal, to more unorthodox, restrained views on Syria and other Middle Eastern conflicts, to his more conciliatory approach to Russia and truly bizarre fixation with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.So what comes next?”

Donald Trump Is about to Become America’s President. Here’s What His Foreign Policy Should Be.

“Trump has an opportunity to dramatically reshape a conventional wisdom that has consistently failed America.”

Our Foreign Policy Choices: Rethinking America’s Global Role

“America’s foreign policy cannot simply rely on the business-as-usual policies that have sustained us in recent years. Instead, the country must look to alternative approaches to foreign policy, many of which are better suited to dealing with the complexities of the 21st century.”

The Problem with Obama’s Light Footprint

In a new analysis, Brad Stapleton critiques Obama’s light footprint approach to military intervention, arguing it adjusts tactics instead of strategy….

 In The Problem with the Light Footprint: Shifting Tactics in Lieu of Strategy, Stapleton argues that President Obama’s effort to avoid becoming embroiled in another conventional ground war by adopting a “light footprint” approach to military intervention is fundamentally flawed.

The lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq have made Americans extremely wary of embarking upon new foreign military adventures. Unfortunately, Obama has continued to pursue the George W. Bush administration’s goals of defeating terrorism and promoting democratization abroad through military force.

Yet those strategic objectives are unlikely to be secured militarily—with either a heavy or light footprint. Although airstrikes and Special Forces raids may be useful for toppling dictators and decapitating terrorist hierarchies, they contribute little toward the realization of larger political objectives such as the eradication of radical Islamic terrorism or the democratization of the greater Middle East.

In March 2011, Obama authorized U.S. participation in a NATO bombing campaign against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya, a prime example of the light footprint approach. The humanitarian mission soon morphed into regime change, and when Islamic extremists filled the power vacuum left in the wake of the Qaddafi regime, the administration in September 2014 announced a new “systematic campaign of airstrikes’ as to destroy ISIS. Overall, the results of Obama’s interventions in Libya have not served U.S. interests.

Another example of the light footprint approach has been the administration’s reliance on drone strikes. While drone strikes, especially in the northwest region of Pakistan, have decimated the hierarchy of al Qaeda and its affiliates, there are drawbacks as well. As numerous critics have suggested, the U.S. drone program could actually undermine the campaign to eradicate terrorism by engendering anti-American resentment.

The United States needs a new strategy, not just new tactics. Rather than attempting to defeat terrorism abroad, the U.S. should focus on improving intelligence and law enforcement capabilities to mitigate the threat of terrorist attacks at home. And rather than attempting to catalyze democratization with military force, the U.S. should pressure authoritarian regimes to introduce gradual liberal reforms—so that when those countries do eventually democratize, those transitions are more likely to endure.

In short, the United States should adopt a less militaristic strategy. Recognizing the inherent limits of what military action can achieve should lead to a gradualist strategic approach that mitigates the terrorist threat instead of eradicating it, and encourages democracy instead of imposing it through military force.

Read the paper…

U.S. to Deploy Special Operations Forces in Syria

In Senate testimony on October 27th, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter indicated that the U.S. might be taking on a more direct combat role in Syria’s civil war. Later today, President Obama is expected to announce the deployment of U.S. troops to northern Syria. 

According to Cato Institute experts, this is a terrible idea.

“Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s statement…that the U.S. military ‘won’t hold back’ from engaging in ‘direct action on the ground’ in Syria is a troubling development,“ says Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute. "It does not so much indicate mission creep as continuity of flawed policy. Competing objectives burden U.S. policy: helping weak rebels overthrow Assad, which prolongs the war and aids ISIS, and defeating ISIS, which aids Assad. Until we resolve that contradiction, the value of tactical gains against either foe will be limited. We should cease helping rebels and attack ISIS alone.”

Even without U.S. ground troops, the Obama administration’s policy of continuing to fund and arm Syrian rebel groups is problematic enough, especially now that Russia is more deeply involved in backing the Assad regime militarily. According to Visiting Research Fellow Brad Stapleton, this risks getting into a messy proxy war that won’t end well for Washington. “Unfortunately, there is probably little constructive the United States can do at this point to resolve the conflict in Syria and establish a stable new government,” Stapleton writes. “The Obama administration, therefore, should take care not to make a bad situation worse.”

Many commentators have proposed imposing no-fly zones or safe zones in Syria to ease the humanitarian crisis. But, as Emma Ashford, Visiting Research Fellow, explains, this is likely to backfire. “U.S. involvement in Syria displays no strategy, no boundaries and no clear goals,” Ashford writes. “The only viable long-term solution to Syria’s problems is diplomacy. But that has been pushed to the side in favor of airstrikes and limited, ad hoc rebel training programs.”

Christopher Preble, Cato’s Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, argues that “It is time for the president to forcefully state what everyone knows to be true: the United States has no magic formula for solving the Syrian conflict…Outside involvement has fueled the multisided civil war, but failed to deliver a decisive victory for any one faction” and “emotional calls to ‘do something’ or vague invocations of the importance of American leadership” are not helpful.

Sending U.S. troops to intervene in Syria is a poorly thought out strategy that is likely to backfire. We hope President Obama takes into mind the serious concerns our scholars and others have expressed and decides against deploying Special Operations Forces.

The Fight with ISIS: One Year (and Counting) of Unauthorized War

Next week marks the one-year anniversary of the start of America’s War with ISIS. But after 12 months and more than 5,000 airstrikes—and with some 3,500 U.S. soldiers on the ground—Congress has yet to hold a vote on authorization for our latest Middle East war.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) calls this situation “inexcusable.” He has been a leader in the effort to get Congress to live up to the most solemn responsibility with which the Constitution entrusts it. “How much longer will we allow war to be waged without Congress even being willing to have a debate about the strategy and scope of the mission?” he asked from the Senate floor recently. “How much longer will we keep asking service members to risk their lives without Congress doing the basic job” of taking an up-or-down vote on the war?

On Thursday, August 6, Senator Kaine and Cato Vice President Gene Healy will discuss the dangerous growth of executive war powers and how Congress can reclaim its constitutional prerogatives over war and peace.

You can register to attend here. If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoEvents.