President Joe Biden appears ready to ignore the May 1 deadline the Trump administration negotiated for withdrawing from Afghanistan. Why would Biden, who as vice president promised a total withdrawal by 2014, want to extend America's longest war?
One thing is for sure: It isn't because staying several months past the deadline will change conditions on the ground in America's favor. The fundamentals of the war have remained unchanged since nearly the beginning. The Taliban insurgency can and will outlast the U.S. occupation and the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul is too corrupt and weak to establish itself as a sovereign.
The Biden administration's procrastination seems motivated by two fears that, unfortunately, America can do little about. First, U.S. withdrawal could trigger intensified violence and risk the collapse of the Kabul government and its replacement by the Taliban. Second, Afghan civilians may be at increased risk of human rights abuses once the U.S. leaves.
Helpfully, there is little immediate security threat to the United States from a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The group itself has no ambitions beyond Afghanistan's borders and the notion of a terrorist safe haven is a myth resting on a misunderstanding of the operational utility of such territorial havens in carrying out international acts of violence.
The fact that we have failed to defeat the Taliban or to effectively establish a new government after almost 20 years of trying strongly suggests it is an unachievable mission and, far from a reason to stay longer, is in fact a compelling reason to leave as soon as possible.
The fate of the Afghan people is compelling too. Unfortunately, policymakers have to come to grips with the fact they don't have many policy tools to effectively manipulate the treatment of Afghans in Afghanistan. Human rights protections have improved for many Afghans during the U.S. occupation, including respect for women's rights. But even after nearly two decades of efforts on the ground, the United Nations still ranks Afghanistan 153rd out of 160 countries for gender equality. In a 2017 index, Afghanistan tied with Syria for the worst place in the world to be a woman.
If U.S. policymakers are serious about adopting policies that can protect Afghans under threat, they should welcome Afghans to American shores. The first step is to restart the refugee program that was effectively canceled by President Donald Trump. Biden said he wants to welcome 125,000 refugees, but he hasn't taken the first step—authorizing an additional 62,500 this year—even though the presidential determination is sitting on his desk waiting for his signature. Biden could permit entry to 40,000 Afghans a year if he wanted to.
A second step would be to allow Americans to privately sponsor refugees at their own expense. Such a program could be modeled on America's experience with private sponsorship for Jews fleeing the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and on how Canada runs its very successful system today. The Biden administration could start the pilot program and enlist veteran groups who have been at the forefront of arguing for their Afghan comrades to find refuge in America.
That leads us to the Special Immigration Visa (SIV) program for Afghans who were employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government. These folks risked their lives to help American forces and the Taliban will show them no mercy if it takes over. But the SIV is mired in bureaucracy, preventing many deserving applicants from coming here. Biden should give the SIV program a kick in the pants to immediately welcome the roughly 17,000 Afghan employees of the U.S. and their roughly 50,000 family members.
The U.S. could also help European and Asian countries settle Afghan refugees within their borders. Many Afghan refugees want to go to Europe where their family members are living and nothing is stopping the Biden administration from working with the Europeans to facilitate such a humanitarian migration.
Unfortunately, the government probably won't organize itself in time to help Afghans in these ways. The last, desperate option that the Biden administration will have to consider is paroling Afghan refugees into the United States. Under presidential authority, Biden could fly refugees directly from Afghanistan or surrounding countries to the island of Guam and process them there for entry to the U.S. They could immediately start working and building new lives for themselves.
This is what the United States did for many Kurds during the 1990s after the U.S. government asked them to rebel against Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq and then abandoned them to be slaughtered by the Iraqi government.
Biden's parole authority is the same that President Gerald Ford had when he decided to process about 111,000 Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. At the time, a young senator named Joe Biden said, "The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese." The success of the Vietnamese in the United States should have changed Biden's mind in the intervening decades.
Simply put, the United States has lost the war in Afghanistan. By pushing past the May 1 withdrawal date, Biden is merely delaying the inevitable. Afghanistan and its people are unlikely to be much better off by maintaining a small military presence there for a few months longer. Offering refuge to Afghans fleeing abuse would be a constructive human rights policy. Extending a lost war won't be.
The post Let the Afghan People Come appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yemen is the latest U.S. foreign policy disaster. For all the wrong reasons, the United States has been instrumental in enabling Saudi Arabia's ruthless war of choice in Yemen.
After almost a year of bombings, Yemen is a humanitarian catastrophe. Over 6,000 Yemenis have been killed—half of them civilians. According to a recent United Nations report, the Saudi-led coalition has "conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects," including refugee camps, hospitals, weddings, and mosques. Saudi bombing has reduced large tracts of several cities to rubble. Some of the attacks, according to the U.N. panel, could amount tocrimes against humanity.
As of this month, over two million people in Yemen are internally displaced, millions lack access to potable water, and thanks to a U.S.-supported Saudi blockade on imports, more than 14 million Yemenis are at risk of starvation.
Throughout, the U.S. has quietly but dutifully lent the Saudis weapons, logistics assistance, and diplomatic cover. It's time to stop.
The civil conflict in Yemen has its roots in the overthrow in 2011 of long-time U.S.-Saudi ally Ali Abdullah Saleh. In the midst of the unrest, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. supported a political transition to a government headed by President Abed-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, in which he was the only candidate on the ballot. Yemen's Shiite Houthi rebels waged an insurgency against the Hadi government and captured the capital city Sanaa in 2014.
The civil war then morphed into an intractable proxy war when, in March of last year, Saudi Arabia decided to wage a vicious bombing campaign under the pretext of destroying the Houthi rebellion and reinstating Hadi's beleaguered government. Riyadh views the Houthis as a proxy of Iran, and after the peaceful diplomatic settlement between the U.S. and Iran over the latter's nuclear program, U.S. officials have apparently felt obliged to reassure Saudi Arabia by supporting its war in Yemen.
The problem is that Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen compromises both U.S. interests and its moral standing. Our interests are harmed because undermining the Houthis and contributing to the power vacuum in the country has benefitted the position of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which happens to share Saudi distaste for the Houthis.
The Saudis succeed in garnering U.S. support in part by characterizing the war as a fight against terrorism. But the Saudis and al-Qaeda are actually in an awkward alliance in this fight, making U.S. help even more misguided.
As for our moral standing, by supporting Saudi Arabia's military action, we are a party to serious war crimes and are indirectly at fault for the devastating humanitarian crisis the people of Yemen now face.
The Saudi intervention clearly violates the just war tenet of jus ad bellum. That tenet dictates that nations not only have a just cause for going to war but also resort to military force only after all other options have been exhausted. Despite Saudi claims to the contrary, the intervention is clearly not a case of self-defense. The notion that Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East (kept afloat primarily by Saudi funds), represents a military threat to Saudi Arabia is absurd. And to argue Saudi bombs are justified to prevent future terrorist attacks is to argue for preventive war, which violates just war theory and the UN Charter.
The Saudis insist that their actions are legal because the legitimate Yemeni government invited military intervention. But the Hadi government hardly deserves the label legitimate. Hadi was elevated to the presidency after serving in Saleh's autocratic regime as vice president. Once president, Hadi used his position to consolidate power against the Houthis and Saleh loyalists all whilemisappropriating billions of dollars. A better description would be to call the Hadi government a tool of Saudi Arabia, since Saudi Arabia not only brokered the deal that allowed him to replace Saleh but also enabled him to return to Yemen after the Houthis drove him from the country. Arguing that the Saudis are responding to a call for help is essentially to argue that the Saudis asked themselves to intervene in Yemen.
So, if Saudi Arabia's argument for intervention is weak, what's the U.S.'s excuse? Any claim that this is a part and parcel of the war on terror is dubious, considering the bombing of Yemen is, if anything, bolstering Islamic extremists. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia itself is a major exporter of the kind of jihadist ideology that drives groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Even if it were about countering terrorist groups, if the threat to Saudi Arabia from Yemen is remote, the threat to the United States is certainly too small to justify violating the rules of war, international moral norms, and common decency.
Beyond placating overexcited Saudi fears of a U.S. strategic tilt towards Iran, there simply is no moral, legal, or strategic justification for what the U.S. is doing in Yemen.
The post The U.S. Should Stop Supporting the War in Yemen appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One of the more vivid political talking points to come out of Washington in the midst of Russia's military incursions into Ukraine is that Russian President Vladimir Putin carried out such provocative actions because Obama's failure to enforce his "red line" on Syria and commence with a bombing campaign this past fall signaled to Putin he would not face consequences.
"I really believe that when Vladimir Putin looks around the world—sees what happened in Syria when the red line turned pink and the president didn't act," Republican Senator John McCain told CNN, "I think he's emboldened and he's acting."
The Wall Street Journal, similarly, put it down to "Western weakness," arguing "it's no coincidence that Mr. Putin asserted himself in Ukraine not long after Mr. Obama retreated in humiliating fashion from his 'red line' in Syria."
The truth is, anyone who actually believes Putin took military action in Ukraine because Obama backed away from his plans to bomb Syria illegally, doesn't know anything about international relations.
First of all, the most immediate parallel to Russia's occupation of Crimea, Ukraine's semi-autonomous peninsula, is Russia's 2008 military action in Georgia, another former Soviet state that was leaning too far West for Moscow's comfort. Following violent skirmishes, Russian forces occupied Georgia's separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
This happened during the George W. Bush administration, which was so willing to use military force that it invaded Iraq on trumped up pretexts and in violation of international law. If Moscow were taking its cues based on Washington's willingness to use force, surely it would have held back in Georgia for fear of retaliation from the Bush administration.
Whenever the United States fails to act with violence abroad—a rarity, mind you—you have politicians and pundits howling about America's "credibility" being at stake. If other countries see us backing down, goes the thinking, they won't properly fear U.S. power and therefore they'll be unrestrained in their actions.
Actually, the technical political science literature has largely put the "credibility" argument to rest. "There's little evidence that supports the view that countries' record for keeping commitments determines their credibility," write two scholars who have studied the concept.
"The illusory belief of America's ability to shape, leverage, influence, sway, direct, or control foreign events is widespread within Washington's foreign policy community," writes Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Its direct implication is that whenever or wherever things go wrong elsewhere on earth, it must be America's fault."
Obama indeed foolishly drew a "red line" for the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad: If chemical weapons were used in its civil war, he promised, the U.S. would use military force in Syria.
But when it looked like that red line had been crossed, the president found himself trapped in a box of his own making. As the administration began preparing for war, U.S. allies were unsupportive, the American people were strongly opposed, and it looked as if Congress would vote no.
In other words, if Obama had gone through with his promise to bomb Syria, the action would have had no international legitimacy and no Congressional consent. In fact, it would have been a war crime according to international law, which prohibits the use of force against another state without the approval of the UN Security Council or unless it preempts an imminent threat.
If anything, America's utter disregard for international law gives license to other powerful countries, like Russia, to behave similarly.
"The steps Russia has taken are a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty, Ukraine's territorial integrity…they're a violation of international law," President Obama said this week.
It's worth noting that this was exactly the argument Putin used in opposing Obama's plan to bomb Syria. He even wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times warning that such action would violate Syrian sovereignty and international law.
Russia also used this argument when it opposed the Clinton administration's military intervention in the Balkans in 1999. Serbia, a Russian ally, was quelling a separatist movement in its province of Kosovo and, under the pretext of preventing "ethnic cleansing," the United States bombed Serbia without UN authorization and without the justification of self-defense.
And of course there is the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which is a model example of the clearest violation of international law. It fit the description of what a Nuremberg Tribunal judge called "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
If America flouts international law as a matter of routine, how can it then turn around and condemn Russia for its own illegal military actions?
When people see the actions of Russia, or some other government, as the result of alleged "weakness" on the part of the U.S. for failing to more readily bomb whatever country at the drop of a hat, what they are really advocating is for America to rule the world by force.
As any mafia don knows, the threat or use of violence can be an effective way to enforce obedience. But if that's how the U.S. is supposed to act on the world stage, advocates should have the courage to say it, and drop the usual platitudes about self-determination, international law, and American "credibility."
The post Russia Didn't Invade Ukraine Because of US 'Weakness' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In what many described as yet another indication of a monumental shift happening in the Grand Old Party, the Republican National Committee last week passed a resolution calling for an end to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
But the party's apparent shuffling to a more limited government, civil liberties-conscious platform may not be as genuine as some believe.
The RNC's resolution, which passed by an "overwhelming majority," declares "the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution."
These are strong words for the party that stood by President George W. Bush when he secretly (and illegally) ordered the NSA to spy on the domestic communications of Americans without any warrants at all. Time magazine's Zeke Miller branded the RNC's resolution "the latest indication of a growing libertarian wing of the GOP."
It's not just on NSA surveillance that Republicans are choreographing a shift. Chris Christie, Republican Governor of New Jersey and expected 2016 presidential candidate, made headlines earlier this month when he condemned the "failed war on drugs" in his second inaugural address.
Departing from the traditional Republican orthodoxy that more prison beds equal less crime, Christie railed against the canard that "incarceration is the cure of every ill caused by drug abuse."
Rand Paul (R-KY), another expected presidential candidate and the perceived leader in the GOP's libertarian swing, has also worked in Congress to eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug possession.
"[M]ore and more conservatives are clambering down from the prison ramparts," wrote political scientists David Dagan and Steve Teles in a 2012 article in The Washington Monthly. "Change is coming to criminal justice because [of] an alliance of evangelicals and libertarians" on the right, they claimed.
Many libertarians have also been pleased with Republicans' triumphant rekindling of anti-spending, anti-debt rhetoric, which seems to owe its rebirth to the election of Barack Obama as a catalyst.
All of this is done with an eye toward the poll numbers. Americans increasingly oppose draconian drug war policies, debt-ridden government, and excessively interventionist foreign policies.
But libertarians would do well to keep in mind a simple lesson of politics: Never trust a party out of power.
Time and time again, the party not occupying the White House and lacking full control of Congress opposes the status quo and hunkers down on purported party creeds, only to contradict those principles when they return to power.
The reality is that holding power brings perverse constraints, incentives, and perspectives on policy, while being out of power incentivizes politicians to exploit public discontent and capitalize on the political winds.
In the 1990s under President Bill Clinton, much of the GOP fancied itself downright noninterventionist in the realm of foreign policy. Republicans railed against Clinton's meddling in Somalia and, especially after the "Black Hawk Down" incident, insisted on a pullout.
Republicans also resisted Clinton's humanitarian interventions into the Balkans on the grounds that Bosnia and Kosovo were not vital U.S. interests and that it could potentially embroil the U.S. in a civil war that was none of our business.
Although then-Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) drafted a resolution that would have barred money for airstrikes against Serbia in support of Kosovo, the Senate ended up narrowly passing a bill authorizing NATO attacks. But that authorization failed to pass the Republican-led House of Representatives.
"In the run-up to the 2000 presidential elections, U.S. participation in Balkan peacekeeping became a prominent campaign issue," according to the Congressional Research Service, "with Republican candidate George W. Bush and his advisors indicating that a Bush Administration would move to withdraw U.S. armed forces from the Balkan operations."
The Bush-Cheney campaign famously ran on a platform of a "humble foreign policy" and "no nation-building." As a matter of course, that was abandoned once they came into office and the Republican-controlled Congress readily discarded their Clinton-era foreign policy of restraint.
Fiscal responsibility was another common Republican refrain throughout the Clinton administration, with welfare reform and other fiscal belt-tightening topping the GOP agenda.
Upon getting the White House in 2000, though, much of that went out the window and Republicans went on to spend more frivolously than Clinton ever had, even having the temerity to create a whole new entitlement program with Medicare Part D. In the Obama-era, Republican and now Tea Party rhetoric against Big Government spending and borrowing has come back in fashion.
These politics are playing out constantly on both sides. It has become almost trite to point out the Democratic Party's betrayal of its Bush-era opposition to war and civil liberties abuses. On everything from NSA surveillance and Guantanamo Bay to pulling out of reckless wars, Democrats no longer seem like the party of peaceniks and civil libertarians.
Undoubtedly, libertarian-leaning GOP players like Rand Paul and Justin Amash (R-MI) are new and possibly game-changing figures. But the sincerity of their laissez-faire bona fides is hardly the issue, just as Obama's ostensibly sincere opposition to Bush's NSA surveillance and hawkish foreign policy had no bearing on how quickly he flip-flopped once in office.
Moreover, the GOP's hospitality to people like Paul and Amash is likely to dry up once it's a Republican's NSA and not a Democrat's.
Lord Acton warned about the tendency of power to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt absolutely. That is surely the case in Washington and especially in the executive branch, where the full burden of bureaucratic inertia and a president's brigade of unelected advisers, invariably long-standing members of the establishment whose positions don't whimsically tilt with the opinion polls, resist even genuine attempts to alter the status quo.
The public's growing libertarian proclivities may torque American politics in a more positive direction over the long term, but nobody should be surprised when, if Republicans control the White House and Congress in 2016, they slickly erase from their platforms, and the history books, this day's more libertarian posture.
The post Don't Get Too Comfortable With the GOP's New Love For Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A domestic surveillance system established after the terrorist attacks of September 11 collects and shares intelligence on a mass scale about "the everyday activities of law-abiding Americans, even in the absence of reasonable suspicion," according to a new report.
The report, released this month by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute at NYU School of Law, found that law enforcement data sharing programs organized by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are fraught with waste and abuse and have whittled away at civil liberties protections while evading sufficient oversight.
"Until 9/11, police departments had limited authority to gather information on innocent activity, such as what people say in their houses of worship or at political meetings," the report explains. "Police could only examine this type of First Amendment-protected activity if there was a direct link to a suspected crime. But the attacks of 9/11 led law enforcement to turn this rule on its head."
Amidst unprecedented focus on overreach at the National Security Agency (NSA), many Americans have come to understand the risk of being spied on by the government in their electronic communications. But the intelligence-sharing hubs coordinated between DHS and state and local police departments around the country, called "fusion centers," show there is extensive surveillance of Americans' physical and social activities as well.
In 2012, a Senate investigation found that fusion centers cost taxpayers billions of dollars, but disrupted no actual terrorist plots. The investigation said the intelligence gathering was "oftentimes shoddy" and "more often than not unrelated to terrorism" while "sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties."
As the Associated Press reported at the time of the Senate report, fusion centers often targeted the First Amendment activities of Americans, "circulating information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights."
Fusion centers in Boston, Massachusetts, filed scores of "intelligence reports" on anti-war activists, according to findings from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"We now have proof of what peace groups and activists have long suspected: Boston Police officers have worked within the local fusion spying center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), to monitor the lawful political activity of local peace groups and track their movements and beliefs," the ACLU's Nancy Murray wrote last year.
"This information is fed into an array of federal information sharing networks, creating mountains of data," the Brennan Center report explains, describing the apparent civil liberties infringements as "potentially illegal."
"In some jurisdictions," the report warns, "police have used aggressive information-gathering tactics to target American Muslim communities without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such practices have not generated investigative leads or proven especially useful in preventing potential terrorist attacks."
Fusion centers collect information on "such innocuous and non-criminal activities as photography, looking through binoculars, and taking notes."
Other activities collected by law enforcement officials and stored in fusion centers included:
These complex intelligence programs are comprised of work by federal, state, and local authorities and are deliberately decentralized. According to the Brennan Center, proper "intelligence oversight is extremely uncommon at the state and local level."
The report urges significant operational and oversight reforms to the program, including requiring police and intelligence officials to adopt basic "reasonable suspicion" standards for collecting information on citizens and to "prohibit the collection, maintenance, or dissemination of information that relies on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation as a factor in establishing reasonable suspicion."
The Brennan Center report does not include recommendations for imposing accountability on federal, state, and local authorities for violating the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans.
The lack of accountability mirrors that found in the NSA surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden. Last week, a federal judge ruled that NSA's collection of virtually every American's phone records was likely unconstitutional and "almost Orwellian" in its scope. Judge Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, said the authors of the Constitution would be "aghast."
And the secret FISA court tasked with overseeing NSA programs found in 2011 that the NSA "frequently and systematically violated" statutory laws governing how intelligence agents can search databases of Americans' telephone communications and that NSA analysts deliberately misled judges about the nature of the programs in order to get court approval.
"The rules have been broken, and the rules have been broken a lot," Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in October.
Systematically violating both statutory and constitutional restrictions and infringing on the Fourth Amendment rights of millions of Americans' as a matter of policy are no minor transgressions. They are crimes. But no NSA or executive branch official has been called to account.
As the ongoing controversy over the NSA leaks clearly demonstrates, 9/11 prompted the intelligence community to seriously exceed its authority and expand its capabilities to spy on citizens in the name of foiling terrorists. Despite serious offenses, an erosion in the rule of law has prevented government officials from being prosecuted. And the Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers are no different.
The post Fusion Centers: Expensive and Dangerous to Our Liberty appeared first on Reason.com.
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