The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act has made headlines mostly in connection to President Trump’s insistence that he will veto the annual military funding resolution if it does not change the regulation of social media sites and preclude renaming of military bases honoring leaders of the Confederacy. But the bill deserves public attention for reasons other than these lame-duck nonsequiturs, which may well be overridden by a veto-proof congressional majority: The 2021 NDAA would make it more difficult to end the 19-year war in Afghanistan.
As written, the bill implements two roadblocks to withdrawal from Afghanistan, where U.S. intervention has long since devolved into a grinding stalemate with nothing resembling victory to be had. It permits Congress to withhold funds for withdrawal until the Pentagon and other executive branch agencies report to Congress. This reporting requirement is triggered before U.S. troop levels are reduced below 4,000 (or whatever number is deployed when the NDAA is passed) and again before a reduction below 2,000.
These roadblocks are cast as accountability measures, a means by which the executive branch can fulfill its “constitutional obligation to provide the Congress and the American people with regular, timely, and comprehensive information on the status of security operations and diplomatic efforts in Afghanistan.” Ordinarily, any accountability in U.S. foreign policy would be welcome news. But, whatever the rhetoric may suggest, the goal here isn’t accountability — not really, not primarily. The goal is to further prolong what is already the United States’ longest war by suffocating what little political will in Washington exists to bring forth the withdrawal from Afghanistan desired by about 3 in 4 Americans.
In our age of executive war-making, a congressional attempt to forestall a war’s conclusion is something of a “man bites dog” story. Unfortunately, the dog is being bitten with some regularity.
The same dynamic was in play this past March, when news of then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s “blank slate review” of U.S. military activities in Africa was met by H.R.6089, a bill which would have prohibited use of “funds to reduce the number of U.S. Armed Forces deployed to the U.S. Africa Command [AFRICOM] Area of responsibility” absent a “report on issues including U.S. political and military strategies in the region and the potential effects of a withdrawal.” This is the exact model used in the 2021 NDAA’s Afghanistan reporting requirement.
A 2019 resolution would have likewise used this model to maintain U.S. deployments in Syria in perpetuity. It failed too, but the Senate passed a similar resolution, albeit a nonbinding one. The 2019 NDAA successfully used the same approach to keep up U.S. troop levels above 22,000 in South Korea, and this 2021 NDAA does the same, though it raises that figure to 28,500. The 2021 bill similarly limits U.S. footprint reductions in Germany and requires retroactive reporting on some AFRICOM reductions, though withdrawal funds aren’t constrained. (Though more debatable in strategic implications, it is worth noting the same model is used to curtail the reduction of the Pentagon’s civilian workforce, as well as for all installation transfers to Trump’s Space Force.)
What’s so strange about this pattern is not congressional participation in foreign policy. What’s strange is the direction of that participation.
The congressional assignment of power to declare war to Congress was intended as a means of slowing the rush to war, creating space for calmer heads to perhaps prevail. Refusing to give the power to initiate war to the executive was a way of “clogging rather than facilitating war [and instead] facilitating peace,” James Madison’s records of the constitutional convention record George Mason saying. The Constitution envisions the president being too eager to fight and the Legislature balancing that impulse, but in the 2021 NDAA, the Legislature is instead blocking the commander in chief from a prudent and belated withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Beyond the initiation of hostilities, we likewise expect to see Congress setting limits on troop deployments, whether by specifying a timeline by which a military intervention must end, drawing a geographic boundary, or restricting funding. But the limit being set here is the reverse of that: Instead of constraining the president’s ability to extend a military intervention, it constrains his ability to end it. Instead of constraining war, it constrains peace.
This is an odd and dangerous thing. Worse than the usual congressional fecklessness about foreign policy, this Congress-led military interventionism actively subverts our constitutional safeguards, rendering them pointless by inverting the expected political dynamic. In the name of introducing more accountability to our foreign policy, this sort of congressional action destroys what little accountability is left. Instead of preventing the overdue end of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, Congress should concern itself with blocking the next presidential abuse of war powers.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at the Week, and columnist at Christianity Today.
