Congress AWOL on Afghanistan

In a thoughtful speech last month Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, discussed the challenging conditions for U.S. success in Afghanistan. Regarding who would determine whether those conditions could be met, however, Kerry referred only to President Barack Obama making a “valid assessment” before he “gives the green light for more troops.” Neither the senator nor other top congressional leaders of either party have insisted that there also be a legislative hand on the light switch.

{mosads}To be sure, Sen. Kerry has urged that Congress “test all of the underlying assumptions in Afghanistan and make sure they are the right ones.” But he nowhere acknowledges that the only way that Congress as an institution can “test” policy assumptions and “make sure” they are right is to debate and vote on binding legislation. Furthermore, voting forces legislators to defend their positions to their colleagues and constituents, improving the chances that the United States will ultimately “get it right” both substantively and politically.

Haven’t we learned in Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and over the last 30 years in Afghanistan that when Congress abdicates its constitutional partnership with the president in foreign policy, bad things happen? Who can look back at even the eloquent speeches, stimulating public hearings and legal delegations of power to the president of those days and conclude they were adequate “tests” of flawed executive branch policies?

If, as expected, the administration’s new strategy includes 20,000 to 40,000 additional U.S. troops, Congress will not even have to approve the necessary financing until an “emergency supplemental appropriation request” comes forward next spring. Yet if Congress postpones a vote on Afghanistan policy until new troops and civilians have been deployed and new expectations raised among Afghans and NATO allies, it is likely to contribute nothing at all to that policy. Experience has shown that, barring military disaster, appeals to “support our troops and their commander in chief” and “not let down our friends” will prevail over any independent legislative stirrings.

Alternatively, Congress could decide to become truly relevant. Thus far key committees have heard testimony from non-administration experts, and a number of members have traveled to Afghanistan. The next essential step forward would be for the committees to wield their weapons to extract critical information from the administration regarding many of the key policy issues:

• The Karzai regime’s capacity to be a credible political and military partner (a controversial issue within the administration).

• The likely reaction of Afghan civilians to more intense military action.

• The willingness of Pakistan to cooperate with U.S. action against its sometime ally, the Afghan Taliban.

• The importance of a potentially enlarged al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan given changes since 2001 in its strength, alternative locations open to it, and in the overall decentralization and diversification of the global terrorist threat.

As we have seen over and over in the secretive realm of foreign affairs, when an administration carries its policy to Capitol Hill, it reveals only those facts that buttress its argument. Congress’s failure to insist on seeing the Bush administration’s evidence that Saddam Hussein had active nuclear and biological weapons programs led us into an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq. And Congress’s failure to uncover the Clinton administration’s “unwritten” policy of encouraging Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia “limited our ability to responsibly debate and legislate on the Bosnian issue,” Sen. Kerry later wrote. Congress possesses ample means to obtain the truth if it wants it: smart and politically sensitive members, expert staff, oaths of truthfulness for administration witnesses, subpoenas for withheld documents and testimony, and insistence on appropriate declassification of key facts the public should know.

If Congress got serious about Afghanistan policy and put it on its crowded legislative schedule, what could it hope to accomplish?

While it would be premature to forecast the substance of legislation, its form would likely consist of binding conditions on current or future military aid. Sen. Kerry and his committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar (Ind.), are quite familiar with this approach. Two decades ago, as a rising Communist insurgency confronted the corrupt, pro-U.S. Marcos regime in the Philippines, the two senators teamed up with House colleagues to condition further U.S. military assistance on the holding of free and honest elections. They subsequently monitored and evaluated Marcos’s fraudulent vote. Their efforts led to a peaceful democratic transition and the defeat of the insurgency. Congress was hailed both by Filipinos and previously resistant officials of the Reagan administration.

It is now seven years since Congress held an ill-informed and largely desultory debate on the Republican administration’s request for a blank check to use force in Iraq. The common thread in the acquiescence of the Democratic-controlled Senate was what then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) called “a little bit of faith.” Will it be different this time?

Weissman, a former subcommittee staff director with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is the author of A Culture of Deference: Congress’s Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy.