Epicenter of Mendacity: Obama's Illegal War Against
Afghanistan
5 December 2009By Dave Lindorff
Nobody in the corporate media mentions it, but the war
in Afghanistan which President Barack Obama just
ramped up by 50% this year, with the dispatch, first
of 17,000 troops last spring and now with another
30,000 troops, to begin deployment on Christmas, is
being fought on the shaky legal basis of a hastily
passed Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)
voted by Congress back in October 2001, more than
three years before Obama was even elected to the
Senate.
Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan on a lie
to fight in an illegal war
That AUMF was the handiwork of President George W.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and it was rammed
through House and Senate with almost no debate in the
wake of the 9-11 attacks and then used to justify most
of the subsequent assaults on the Constitution and
Bill of Rights that are still haunting America and the
world today.
While Congress saw the 2001 AUMF as an authorization
to launch an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (an
attack that quickly toppled the Taliban government,
but that famously failed to crush Al Qaeda, thanks to
its being called off half a year later so troops could
be shifted to a new war in the making against Iraq),
Bush and Cheney interpreted it as a “declaration of
war” in a “global war on terror,” which they claimed
had no border, no end, and which they even tried to
claim extended to within the boundaries of the US.
So anxious were Bush and Cheney to be permanent
wartime generalissimos, unfettered by Constitutional
constraints, that just minutes before the measure went
to the Senate for a vote, according to then Senate
Majority Leader Tom Daschle, they sought to add the
words “in the United States” after the phrase
“appropriate force” in the language of the resolution.
As Daschle, who wisely refused their request, notes,
“This last-minute change would have given the
president broad authority to exercise expansive powers
not just overseas—where we all understood he wanted
authority to act—but right here in the United States,
potentially against American citizens.”
The point though, is that the 2001 AUMF was in fact an
authorization to use military force to go after
terrorism. It was not an authorization to conduct a
full-scale war against another nation, or to become
enmeshed in a civil war in another nation, which is
what is going on in Afghanistan today. That, in fact,
is why even Bush felt he needed a second AUMF to
authorize his invasion of Iraq.
President Obama is trying to finesse this by falsely
claiming, with a straight face, that Afghanistan is
part of the “epicenter of the violent extremism
practiced by al Qaeda” in the world. He is
deliberately trying—and getting full support from the
complicit corporate media—to conflate the Taliban with
Al Qaeda to justify his absurd claim, too, by also
falsely claiming in his speech that several unnamed
“extremists" have been apprehended in the US who were
sent here recently from some ill-defined terror
central inside of Afghanistan.
The truth is that not one act of terrorism outside of
Afghanistan has been attributed to the Taliban of
Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban, while admittedly a
brutal, reactionary, fundamentalist group of militant
Islamists, are not global jihadis bent on wreaking
havoc in the Western world or even in the rest of the
Islamic world. They are a domestic Afghan military and
political movement that is seeking to return to power
in Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda, the organization that was the target of the
Congressional AUMF resolution in 2001, has long since
abandoned Afghanistan for safer, greener pastures.
This being the case, Obama’s war in Afghanistan, and
especially his decision to intensify it dramatically,
is being conducted illegally, without any actual
authorization from Congress, as required by the
Constitution.
If the president wants to mire the US further and more
deeply in a civil war in Afghanistan at this point,
aimed at defeating the Taliban in that country, he
should at least be required to obtain a new resolution
in Congress authorization that action.
As a constitutional lawyer, this president knows that
he is acting illegally, which is why he was so careful
in his speech to West Point cadets on Tuesday to make
the bogus claim that Afghanistan remains the epicenter
of terrorism. But governing by lies, as we already
have been for the last two presidential terms, is no
way to govern, and the American people will eventually
realize that they are being lied to again. Indeed, the
fact that a majority of Americans, according to polls,
want to see the Afghan War ended, shows that even
given the biased pro-war media, and the dredging up
again of the hoary 9-11 attacks, most people
understand this on some level.
The Bush/Cheney administration did much to undermine
and wreck Constitutional government during their eight
years in office. Many people had hoped that Obama was
serious when he said during his campaign that he
wanted to restore Constitutional governance if
elected. But by his latest move, committing the US to
a full-scale war in Afghanistan on the basis of a lie
and without any proper war resolution from Congress,
he has joined his predecessor in further debasing both
the Constitution and language itself.
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