Afghanistan
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, George Washington, in his farewell address to the Nation, warned us against foreign entanglements and costly wars. He and the other Founders knew firsthand the danger that enduring engagement abroad posed to our Republic and to the cause of freedom.
Despite those warnings, we, the United States, have been embroiled in a directionless, trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan for the past 20 years.
And after all that investment--the American blood and treasure poured into that cause--Americans watched in horror as any semblance of the so-called progress and investment in a democratic Afghanistan crumbled in a matter of weeks. Haunting images demonstrating this failure tragically played out before us. Americans hadn't seen tragedy of this type since the Fall of Saigon.
The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that the total monetary cost of our war in Afghanistan amounts to $2.3 trillion, counting U.S. military spending, both on and off budget. U.S. manpower, resources, and expertise were dedicated for decades to the war in Afghanistan.
So we must ask ourselves: What went wrong?
I rise today to explain how the erosion of Congress's constitutional war-making role permitted and, in fact, enabled these failures.
In the early years of the war, Congress shrugged as the President transformed the mission in Afghanistan. President Bush addressed the Nation and the servicemembers going to war in October of 2001, promising ``To all the men and women in our military--every sailor, every soldier, every airman, every coastguardsman, every Marine--I say this: Your mission is defined; your objectives are clear; your goal is just.''
At the time, the mission was clear. The goals were to capture the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks, neutralize the threat posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and ensure the Taliban was not strong enough to provide a safe harbor to al-Qaida.
In 2003, we had substantively accomplished each of those goals. Though killing Osama bin Laden would take until May of 2011, the Taliban had fallen and the leaders of al-Qaida went into hiding outside of Afghanistan. And yet, despite this reality, the Bush administration shifted the mission to physically rebuilding Afghanistan and reshaping the country's government and culture as if to mirror our own.
Even as the mission in Afghanistan was changed dramatically and unrealistically, Congress did not repeal or replace or amend the 2001 authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan.
The Constitution charges the legislative branch to not only fund but also declare and oversee wars, and yet Congress seemed unaffected by the rather dramatic change in mission and strategy.
As a result, the war continued for longer than it should have--much longer--and the United States continued to lose tax dollars, lives, and any attachment to the original goals all at the same time.
As building a democratic Afghanistan became the new mission, Presidents of both parties and the interagency apparatus ignored explicit evidence of failure and, in fact, doubled down on American investment and involvement.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction--created by Congress to oversee and audit funds used for nation-building in Afghanistan--has delivered 427 audits and more than 250 reports to Congress since 2008, detailing the risks, the waste, and the mismanagement in the U.S. mission. Many of these reports pointed out contradictions of our aims and explained the waste, fraud, and abuse plaguing the funds Congress appropriated for the reconstruction projects of all sorts.
Now, thanks to the investigative journalism of Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, ``The Afghanistan Papers'' added another layer to the inspector general's reports, revealing evidence that high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense, in the State Department, and the White House knew that the U.S. mission had no focus, no metrics, no clear coordination, and no defined enemy.
Douglas Lute, a three-star Army General who served as the Afghanistan war czar under President Bush and President Obama, is quoted in the published interview saying ``We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan--we didn't know what we were doing.''
While I share the view with the majority of Americans that withdrawing forces from Afghanistan was the right choice and was, by all accounts, inevitable at some point, the Biden administration's disastrous withdrawal was the culmination of American failure in Afghanistan.
Kabul fell to lawlessness and mass panic. Afghan security forces laid down arms to the Taliban. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled his nation. And the evacuation was so poorly directed that potential terrorists and men with child brides secured seats on U.S. evacuation flights while American citizens were left behind enemy lines. Our Nation lost 13 servicemembers, with many more seriously wounded, to a terrorist attack, and the administration ineptly responded by killing 10 innocent civilians, including 7 children.
President Biden's closing of the war in Afghanistan has been riddled with avoidable mistakes, resulting in both tragedy and embarrassment of historic magnitude. The President and other high-ranking officials must be held accountable for this failure. Anyone else engaging in such mismanagement of our actions in a theater of war would surely be held accountable, and they must too.
Throughout 20 years of engagement, Congress itself has shamefully failed to respond to an executive branch plundering powers that constitutionally belong to Congress. It is time for Congress to do its job. It is time to ensure that such a grave mistake that cost us so much in American taxpayer resources, but most importantly in American blood, will never, ever happen again.
Some of my colleagues and I may disagree on when and exactly how to use military force, but we should debate those matters in the light of day for the American people to view and, even more importantly, for the American people to influence. U.S. engagement in Afghanistan over the last decade and the recent blundered withdrawal demand that we prioritize such a debate. It is long, long overdue.
That is why I, along with my colleagues across the aisle, Senator Chris Murphy and Senator Bernie Sanders, introduced the National Security Powers Act, which would restore Congress's role in national security decisionmaking. This is an opportunity to protect our constitutional order. American citizens and especially those who serve in our military deserve nothing less.
Despite our political differences, as members of the branch of government most accountable to the people, we feel the weight of American blood and treasure sacrificed in our Nation's wars. We may not have all the answers--I certainly don't claim to have them, but we put forth a really thorough, well-reasoned, much-needed set of reforms to ensure that America is not thrown into another endless war without continual congressional input--congressional input that is not just helpful; it is not just a good idea, but congressional input that is actually required by the Constitution itself.
It is that kind of input that has been neglected. And, sadly, it has been neglected not just by the executive branch, but it has been neglected by the Congress, by the very people who are supposed to wield it.
See, there is a big difference when it comes to war-making power between our system of government and the one we left behind--the one that was based in London. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 69, this was one of the key design features of the Constitution, one of the things that differentiates it from our former London-based system of government.
There, the Chief Executive--that is the monarch; in those days, King George III--would take the country to war unilaterally. It was up to Parliament then to figure out how to fund it. Our Founding Fathers decided to make a break from that practice. They did not give this power to declare war to the Chief Executive, no. They gave that power only to the branch of government that would stand accountable to the people at the most regular intervals, the legislative branch.
When we denigrate this role, when we minimize this responsibility, when we shirk this duty, we do so to our own everlasting shame and in violation of the oath that each and every one of us has taken to support the Constitution of the United States.
In this Republic, Congress can no longer sit idle while the Executive alone decides the fate of our Nation's wars and those who fight in them. While we can't change history, we can live up to the ideals of our Constitution. I pray that we will. And I know that together we can, we must, and we will.
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