Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq

It's been a long winter for the peace movement. Waiting for Obama
has proved fruitless. The Great Recession has strengthened Wall Street
and diverted attention from the wars. The debate over health care still
won't go away and has demoralized progressive advocates. Given a chance
to exit from Afghanistan when the Karzai election proved to be stolen,
President Obama escalated anyway, but also promised to "begin" exiting
almost before an opposition could mobilize at home.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich will step into the crosswinds this week and
force the House of Representatives to wake up, pay attention, and vote
up or down on the Afghanistan war.

The Kucinich initiative at least will reveal where Congress stands.
Whether it will energize the peace movement for upcoming March protests
or beyond is unpredictable.

Kucinich, interviewed along with other members of Congress by The
Nation last week, is introducing a so-called privileged resolution
requiring the House to hold a three-hour debate this coming Wednesday,
followed by a vote on the Afghanistan war.

The vote is expected to authorize the war, but passage of
Kucinich's initiative would require a withdrawal in thirty days. If the
president rejected such a decision, the withdrawal would be delayed
until the end of 2010, nine months from now.

"It's time to force a debate," Kucinich says. "It's not enough to
slow-walk the end of the war." On Friday Kucinich had 17 co-sponsors
for his measure.

The Kucinich bill is based on the 1973 War Powers Act, passed
during
the upsurge of Congressional opposition to the unilateral war-making of
the executive branch during the Richard Nixon era. The War Powers Act,
strongly opposed by Bush-era officials including Dick Cheney and John
Yoo, was based on Article I, Section 8, of the federal constitution
which, according to James Madison, "expressly vested" the power to
"declare" war in Congress.

According to Gary Wills' history in Bomb Power, the
War Powers legislation actually diluted Congressional authority by
making declaration of war a joint exercise with the White House. Nonetheless, the
symbolic threat to presidential prerogative inflamed Cheney into
describing it as a congressional usurpation. Yoo, the author of the
notorious torture memos in the Bush administration, went so far as to
argue that "declare" in the 18th century meant simply to "recognize[d] a
state of affairs."

The Kucinich measure seeks to remind Congress of the peak
progressive moment when, in tandem with a vast anti-war movement in the
streets, Richard Nixon was forced to resign and the Vietnam War was
terminated. A decade later, Congress again would play a key role in the
Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan era.

But Wednesday's vote may be a measure of how much Congress has
continued to surrender its war-making prerogative to the administration.
Many liberal Democrats interviewed for this article expressed discomfort
or exasperation towards the Kucinich measure, claiming that it will be
overwhelmingly defeated and weaken efforts this spring to introduce
anti-war amendments during debate on the war budget.

In one member's view, the Kucinich proposal represents "complete and
total withdrawal now," which most in Congress refuse to support. A more
common complaint, voiced in a memo from Peace Action, is that "some of
our allies on the Hill are concerned that the relatively low amount
votes for this resolution may make us look weak."

Another member said, "You can't stop Dennis, he does this all the
time, he squeezes members who aren't consulted." Another, who intends to
vote for the Kucinich proposal despite having had no input, said
bluntly, "A shitty vote has consequences."

Meanwhile, on Afghanistan, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is in disarray.
Leadership on Afghanistan issues has been passed to Rep. Mike Honda, a
progressive Democrat from San Jose, who last year circulated a dramatic
exit proposal that would flip US Afghan spending from 80 percent
military to 80 percent civilian. Honda's staff did not return calls from
The Nation requesting further information.

Progressive Caucus co-chair Lynne Woolsey is up in arms against
progressive Democrats who are supporting Marcy Winograd, an anti-war
citizen-candidate running against hawkish Rep. Jane Harman in the South
Bay area of Los Angeles. Woolsey now refuses to work with "outside
groups" such as Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) who are backing
Winograd's primary bid. Woolsey also opposed last year's forums on
Afghanistan sponsored by Democrats including Honda and CPC co-chair Raul
Grijalva. Woolsey simply says the US shouldn't be in Afghanistan, but
nothing more, which leaves her isolated from peace groups and leaves her
own colleagues searching for strategies.

In addition, the once strong Out of Iraq Caucus, with over 70
members, appears dormant or dissolved, despite the growing threats to
Obama's plan for a phased withdrawal of all troops from Iraq by 2012.

Just ahead are debates over the $33 billion funding request for
Obama's troop escalation, and the $159 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq
contained in the proposed military budget. Despite significant
opposition among Democrats to the president's escalation proposal, it is
highly unlikely that the funds will be turned down now that American
troops have been dispatched. Whether a vote will be taken on Rep.
Barbara Lee's proposal to block the $33 billion in funding is unclear at
the moment. But sizeable opposition is expected to rally around exit
strategy measures being jointly contemplated by Rep. Jim McGovern and
Sen. Russ Feingold this spring.

Despite White House opposition, McGovern was able to win support
from a majority of Democrats last year for his resolution calling on the
Pentagon to report an Afghanistan exit strategy by year's end. With the
president having committed to an exit strategy by beginning troop
withdrawals by summer 2011, McGovern's measure might gain greater
traction. He told The Nation he will introduce a revised version
of the exit strategy resolution in the coming weeks.

Feingold's public thinking on Afghanistan hasn't changed since
December when he opposed the president's escalation, according to the
Wisconsin senator's staff. Feingold previously has proposed a "flexible
timetable for reducing our troop levels" and opposed the defense
appropriations bill because of its inclusion of Afghanistan funding.

Feingold and McGovern are expected soon to cooperate in proposing an
exit strategy that contains a timetable for troop reductions. Defining
such an exit plan quickly is key to the Administration's policy for
Afghanistan, since the negotiated departure of US troops won't happen
without one. And most observers of Afghanistan say the Taliban cannot be
drawn into a peace process or political negotiations without a concrete
assurance that the military occupation will end and US/NATO/USAF troops
will be withdrawn or replaced by peacekeepers.

Secret talks with the Taliban have intensified since spring 2009,
the respected Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote recently in the
New York Review of Books. Rashid is an official adviser to the US
diplomatic team led by Richard Holbrooke. In a recent essay he floats a
negotiating scenario which seems quasi-official and, of course, is
officially deniable. His seven-point proposal includes lifting current
sanctions on Taliban leaders so that talks can occur in a neutral venue,
formation of a legal Taliban political party in Afghanistan, and a
seriously-funded "reconciliation body" to create security for returning
Taliban members to Afghanistan.

Rashid's proposal implies, but does not include, a US troop
withdrawal, the key condition demanded by the Taliban in exchange for
starting all-party talks. It is possible that Obama's pledge to "begin"
withdrawing in 2011 is an initial signal of the intention the insurgents
want to hear.

In that case, the McGovern and Feingold initiatives can be crucial
to moving the US, Afghan and Taliban positions closer to a formula for
reconciliation or, more likely, coexistence. The only alternative is the
perpetuation of the neoconservatives' Long War scenario, at trillions of
dollars in budget expenditures, and/or an outbreak of civil war in
Afghanistan.

Whether Congress has the backbone seems to depend on whether there
is the force of public opinion to implant one. The previous experiences
of Vietnam, Central America and Iraq have shaped a skeptical mood within
that public, but it is not sufficiently angry yet to force the end of
the war. A deepening battlefield quagmire will only cement that
skepticism, but Congress has to channel the public mood into political
impact.

Congress's inherent problem is its failure to collaborate with
grassroots opinion in fostering public antiwar sentiment. Instead, as
with the Kucinich measure, at most the members of Congress expect
activists to endorse, support, leaflet, bird-dog, and light up the phone
lines to pressure other members to vote their way. Too often they fail
to use their enormous resources to bring attention and public engagement
to issues not (yet) arousing public opinion or media interest.

Tellingly, the CIA's secret war in Pakistan, which includes the
escalation of drone attacks, has drawn no meaningful Congressional
opposition. The likely reason is that, with the exception of reports by
Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, the casualties and costs of the
drone war have been hidden from the American public.

The re-emergence of a coherent peace movement could help push the
McGovern and Feingold measures forward, and also mount pressure for
hearings on the secret war before it engulfs Pakistan.

The protests planned nationwide in March will revive needed
attention to Afghanistan in many local areas around the country. But on
the national level, the demise of United for Peace and Justice leaves a
vacuum which narrow ideological groups are unable to fill. The dispersal
of protest energies towards other issues--Wall Street bailouts, health
care, Copenhagen, marriage equality--weakens any possibility of a
unified focus around Afghanistan.

Despite these organizational obstacles, the ongoing wars will
inflict serious political and moral consequences. Without a greater role
by the organized peace movement, large numbers of voters will become
passive, or drop away, during the forthcoming congressional elections
and the next presidential one. The Obama administration has never
treated the peace constituency as one worth cultivating, though the Iraq
War was the critical issue difference in the primaries and general
elections in 2006 and 2008. In turn, the peace constituency has never
turned into a permanent, organized, well-funded lobbying force in
Washington--except for the brief flare-ups like those of MoveOn in the
2004-06 cycle.

As a result, everything may depend on whether popular perception is
that Obama and the Democrats have turned promises of peace into action.
At the moment, such potential support is being drained into despair.
Congress and Obama will have to work to bring it back.