Legal Commentary

Notes on our constitutional dictatorship (continued, sadly)

By Jack M. Balkin

Tomorrow's NYTimes apparently will have as its lead story "Administration Presses Pakistan to Fight Taliban," which begins as follows:

"The Obama administration is turning up the pressure on Pakistan to fight the Taliban inside its borders, warning that if it does not act more aggressively the United States will use considerably more force on the Pakistani side of the border to shut down Taliban attacks on American forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials said."

Perhaps I'm missing the point, but this distinctly sounds like the threat of a unilateral declaration of war against Pakistan, "unilateral" because there is, of course, not the slightest hint that the Administration will go to Congress for a declaration of war against our putative ally, Pakistan. What this also reminds me of is the Nixon Administration's rationale for taking the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia, because they were being used as bases for attacks on US forces in Vietnam. This continues a pattern of presidential unilateralism begun by Harry Truman in 1950 and carried to most recent excess by George W. Bush.

I wonder, also, if we are seeing the beginning of a "credibility gap," particularly as regards the terms of our involvement and the phantasmic "withdrawal date(s)" that are now being bruited about. We are still living with the consequences of developing during the Vietnam Era a corrosive cynicism about whatever "our" government told us about the most fundamental issues of war and peace, life and death. Why, exactly, should we believe what we're being told, given that the premises of the articulated policies are incoherent and/or rest on an extraordinary degree of magical thinking, such as the relevance of the COIN manual to Afghanistan, the second-most corrupt country on the face of the earth that has never, apparently, had a strong central government in its centuries-long history, for starters. And, according to tomorrow's Times story, ?'We concluded early on that whatever you do with Pakistan, you don?t want to talk about it much,' one of the president?s senior aides said last week. 'All it does is get backs up in Islamabad.'? Presumably it really doesn't matter what the American people know (or think) about such things, save that the Administration will presumably ratchet up the argument that we "must" move the war into Pakistan in order to protect Ameicans at home. "The implicit threat of not only ratcheting up the drone strikes but also launching more covert American ground raids would mark a substantial escalation of the administration?s counterterrorism campaign." What will happen if the Taliban retaliates by increasing terror bombings in Pakistan and destabilizing control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Will we be sending in troops (with India?) to gain control of that arsenal, which is even more important than the Iraqi oil fields?

I still feel it necessary to say that I am pleased that Obama is President instead of either Clinton or McCain; I admire the demeanor described in the NYTimes story about the many deliberations leading up to the "surge." And I was reinforced in my suspicions last year about Hillary Clinton, who would apparently have gladly sent the full complement of 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. But I increasingly have a sickening feeling that he is almost willfully destroying the hopes that so many of us had that he would in fact bring us change we could believe in.

This is truly an ominous moment in American politics.

Full post as published by Balkinization on December 07, 2009 (boomark / email).