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This summer, the bipartisan, congressionally mandated Afghanistan War Commission (AWC) will kick off a four-year inquiry into the origins, conduct, and conclusion of America’s war in Afghanistan. You should care about this Commission, and you should care about the report they are going to issue. If the AWC produces a quality report—fair, comprehensive, evidence-based—it will guide and inform the next generation of U.S. foreign and security policy.

The AWC presents a rare opportunity: America’s democratic institutions roused to ask pointed questions of the men and women charged with our country’s national security. The Church Committee of the 1970s, and more recently the 9/11 Commission, suggest these types of congressionally-mandated inquiries happen once a generation. A British historian once joked that Britons acquired their empire in a fit of absentmindedness. That is an astute observation. For anyone, myself included, who has patiently explained to friends, family, the pharmacist, the grocer, and others that yes, we really were still in Afghanistan more than two decades after the initial invasion, it certainly rings true. As a nation, we obligated the authorizations and signed the checks without giving much thought about what it is we were authorizing, what we were paying for, or why.

The AWC’s report could ultimately prove to be a consequential moment for the United States. If we get a quality report; if the American people are allowed to read it and consider its meaning and implications for the whole nation, and not just this or that slice of America; and if the report ultimately informs real reforms; it will be significant. More importantly, if you’re looking for proof that democracy in America still works, it counts for something that, after two decades of war, the U.S. government has appointed capable, public-spirited people to investigate and explain clearly and openly what went down in Afghanistan. Exploring and identifying exactly what happened, however, will require AWC members to ask pointed questions ranging the entire breadth of America’s longest war.

Who Was Actually in Charge?

The first question the AWC will need to answer is: how was the war authorized? Authorities are the tendons of our national security. They are the invisible thread that connects the fire team on the ground to the American people back home, linking the budgetary and lawmaking authority of the legislative branch to the operational authority of the executive. Authorities matter.

There are different kinds of authorities and a key question in Afghanistan is: what took place under military authorities, civilian authorities, and intelligence authorities? In a war, authority is usually concentrated in the hands of a commander who, by literal definition, commands the war effort. The commander oversees the theater of conflict, and in this capacity works with Washington to set and implement the president’s strategy. A clear chain of command means clear responsibilities, and responsibility enables the American people to hold commanders accountable for failures and recognize them for their successes. That is the theory.

Yet well before the first American boots hit the ground, Afghanistan defied the logic of normal military operations. America’s involvement in the country before 2001 was driven primarily by the U.S. intelligence community (IC), and the IC took the lead in the discussions about going into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks. This, in effect, placed the U.S. Central Command in an apparently subordinate role to the IC. In 2004, for instance, while many former Taliban headed to Pakistan to join the armed opposition to the U.S.-backed Afghan government led by then president Hamid Karzai, the U.S. forces commander on the ground, Lieutenant General David Barno, drafted policies to avoid harm to civilians. But, according to a comprehensive history of the war in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Barno did not command all of the special operations forces conducting the operations in Afghanistan. Numerous books, studies, memoirs, and newspaper reports suggest that, in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence officers exercised significant autonomy. So then, who was in charge?

A related question is this: what is the appropriate role of intelligence in policy decisionmaking? In theory, intelligence is the function of gathering and analyzing information to inform military and policy decisions. A good AWC report on Afghanistan should ask whether that happened and whether we have—whether we need—updated guardrails to further separate the IC from the U.S. military and policy decision making process.

At the same time, if intelligence officers were in the drivers’ seat, the AWC should ask what impact they had on the core intelligence mission to generate objective, actionable information. Did confusion between the intelligence and policy process have an impact on intelligence? For example, the U.S. IC’s assessment of the durability of Ashraf Ghani’s government following a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan very likely was a critical component of U.S. war and policy planning efforts. Unfortunately, this assessment appears to have been inaccurate. The question is why.

What Were Our War Aims?

The United States sent its forces to Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda and bring Osama bin Laden to justice in the wake of 9/11. The moment American forces swept the Taliban from power—and the U.S. administration at the time refused to consider any post-war power structure that included the Taliban—the United States also became engaged in nation-building, whether America’s leaders liked it or not. Yet, it wasn’t really until 2005 that the George W. Bush administration started defining and funding a post-war Afghanistan. By then, however, the Taliban had already launched its insurgency in earnest. As that and subsequent U.S. administrations defined what post-war Afghanistan should look like, they became more and more committed to an idealized vision for developing a social democracy in one of the poorest countries in the world. Why did U.S. objectives seem to grow and then balloon even as it became clearer and clearer to informed observers that lasting, outright victory in Afghanistan was becoming less and less possible?

One excellent study has charted the U.S. tendency over the years to escalate its commitment to Afghanistan in the face of growing adversity. In democratic politics, as in bureaucratic politics, doubling down often cements authority, while flipflopping is the kiss of death. Added to that, Afghanistan was so far removed from day-to-day politics back home that the costs of staying the course in Afghanistan never seemed as bad as the risk that cutting U.S. losses could lead to a major disaster, perhaps including the reemergence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. This logic seems to have driven policy makers from U.S. presidents to senior officials on the ground, apparently motivating them to respond to chronic American underperformance in Afghanistan by chronically overpromising future results that never materialized.

The proliferation of outsized objectives in Afghanistan was often matched by the proliferation of international actors. Beyond Washington and Kabul, funding appeals were met, policies set, and decisions taken by NATO in Brussels and other international organizations and actors in other foreign capitals, which combined created a dense web of overly ambitious commitments to Afghanistan. Did the many, overlapping lines of effort impede coherent planning or complicate U.S. efforts to set and follow its own established operational priorities? It is worth the AWC asking whether the internationalization of development and security assistance efforts in Afghanistan contributed to a mismatch between ends and means, between promises and what was achievable on the ground.

Post-conflict reconstruction is a tremendous task under the best of circumstances. In Afghanistan, the AWC should ask how and why a major, international peacebuilding effort coincided with a major counterinsurgency campaign to secure Afghan population centers and prop-up the then Afghan government. Fortunately, the AWC will have at its disposal the voluminous records of the Department of Defense’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which documented and continues to document the challenges and pitfalls of reconstructing that country in the midst of a war. Yet SIGAR’s reports are necessarily limited to U.S. governance and U.S. expenditure, which comprise only part of the story. The same question that applied to military command also applies to nation building: who was in charge, and what was the strategy?

The AWC might also consider the wider impact of the contradiction between U.S. reconstruction and war efforts in Afghanistan. U.S. military forces and civilian personnel in Afghanistan typically relied heavily on elite, English-speaking Afghans, familiar with the language of Western governments and donors, to tell them what was going on. What did it mean for ordinary Afghans to experience both the high-flying rhetoric of social reconstruction and the horrors of insurgency and counterinsurgency? What did it mean for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans, who responded to the call to defend democracy overseas?

Making Peace

Just as Americans need to understand why U.S. leaders found it so hard to define their objectives for the war, so too should we ask why the United States found it so difficult to find a path to a working and sustainable peace settlement in Afghanistan. This is not a purely historical consideration. In an era of great power competition, the United States needs to be able to speak with its enemies, and needs to be capable of defining limited, achievable objectives amid conflict. This capacity is critical to America’s ability to limit, control, and halt conflict.

There is general agreement among many observers that the Taliban attempted to engage the United States between 2002 and 2005; U.S. officials, however, did not seriously consider talking to the Taliban or initiate Washington’s outreach efforts in earnest until 2010. The U.S. troop surge was well underway and could have provided an important bargaining chip in negotiations, but the surge also reflected years of America’s fighting and sacrifice in Afghanistan. By 2010, interests and suspicions were deeply entrenched on both sides. There were no substantive negotiations. Instead, for years after 2010, a cycle of preconditions and talks about talks wore on. The available evidence suggests there was no effort to link U.S. policy in Afghanistan—the troop surge, for instance, or the drawdown that followed—to any viable process or framework for peace talks.

Why did it take the better part of a decade of war to think about diplomatic engagement? Why did it take another decade to conclude a three-page agreement with the Taliban? Wars cannot be limited in scope and duration—they cannot end—without diplomacy. The commitment to dialogue, dealmaking and compromise is a necessary component of the use of force. Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, that a bad peace beats a good war, recognized that even a peace based on a three-page agreement is when the hard work of development and engagement and changing minds can truly begin.

Speaking with our enemies is hard. And yet the greatest risk to diplomats is not the enemy, but the perpetual fear their own country will condemn them—or worse—for seeking something less than total victory somewhere other than the field of battle. What is achievable is not always just; what is workable is not always reasonable; but we are always just one more offensive away from ideal conditions.

Thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, the American people deserve to understand why it was so much easier to prolong a fruitless war than to seek a functional peace. Of all the questions the AWC could attempt to answer, this is the most profound. Understanding how and why and when to start or control or stop a fight is the most essential function of statecraft. The Afghanistan War Commission offers America a chance, unique for our generation, to ask whether the U.S. government could have done a better job in Afghanistan and could do a better job in the future of navigating the perils of the very dangerous world we now face. We owe it to ourselves and future generations alike to get this right.

Andrew Baker has over a decade of experience in the public sector and holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University.

The views expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.

Earlier this week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received an invitation from the White House to “probably” meet with President Joe Biden, before the end of the year, somewhere. Meanwhile, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s non-partisan president who has limited power, spent Tuesday meeting with Biden in the Oval Office before addressing a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to mark Israel’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

Herzog’s invitation to Washington, arriving before one for Netanyahu, should be viewed by Jerusalem as a reflection of the United States’ deep commitment to Israel, but a recognition that its current policies are out of sync with Washington’s. Having different policies is unarguably Israel’s sovereign right, and Netanyahu’s as its leader. But if those differences become the default, it can threaten to permanently alter the nature of the relationship.

The right approach to Iran, for example, always the dominant foreign policy concern for Jerusalem, continues to divide Israel and the United States; even as strong bilateral communication and meaningful cooperation on the topic has helped mitigate public disagreements, as happened in 2015 over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But even excellent communication is unlikely to mitigate a public, and angry, Israeli reaction if the Biden administration agrees to even a limited agreement with Tehran. 

As communication has improved on Iran, it conversely seems to have fallen off when it comes to other major foreign policy challenges. The proposed expansion of settlements and settler-Palestinian violence is slowing the pace of progress between Abraham Accords members, most recently demonstrated by Morocco’s decision to cancel the latest Negev Forum. The accords, however, are something the United States places great weight on; a new position was just created at the State Department dedicated to the issue.

Further abroad, Netanyahu’s decision to visit China later this year is prime to compound misalignment since it seems to be less about a genuine bilateral China-Israel relationship and more about a way to needle the United States and compel it to increase its regional involvement.

But Israel is neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE, both of which are trying to employ a strategy of hedging between the United States and China. As Mark Dubowitz, a longtime ally of the Israeli Right and CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said on Twitter, “If Netanyahu thinks he can … play the US and China off each other, he better hope that Israel becomes a major oil producer, returns the $38 billion in US military aid and no longer requires American support at the UN.” 

The announcement over Netanyahu’s decision to visit Beijing follows U.S. frustration with the Israeli leader for his refusal last winter to provide Ukraine with HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, currently sitting in storage. Israel has long been concerned that providing weapons to Ukraine could lead them to fall into the wrong hands and be reverse engineered, threatening Israel’s security. Moreover, Jerusalem was concerned that transferring them to Ukraine would lead Russia to impede Israel’s freedom of action to strike Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, where Russia still operates.

But by denying the request, Netanyahu essentially dismissed out of hand the United States’ biggest near-term global priority in exchange for hoping Russian president Vladimir Putin doesn’t interfere with Israel’s interdiction strikes; all while Russia’s military relationship with Iran grows closer.

And in Israel itself, civil unrest will probably come to a peak over the next two weeks as legislation to curtail the power of the Israeli Supreme Court as an independent check on the legislature advances.

I happen to be in Israel this week for a conference. On Saturday evening, I wandered from my hotel down to Kaplan Street to observe the judicial reform protests in person. What I saw was tens of thousands of overwhelmingly diverse, patriotic, and scared Israelis, fearful that the judicial reforms will fundamentally undermine, in their view, Israel’s democracy.

While a strong U.S.-Israel relationship will, and should, continue no matter what happens with the legislation, there is no way to minimize or avoid that democracy is a shared, core, and fundamental tenet of the U.S.-Israel relationship; even if both of ours are imperfect works in progress.

The United States engages and has strong relationships with lots of countries that don’t share its ethos for democracy and freedom. But those relationships all come with an invisible ceiling.

On Tuesday, Biden told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that there is a need, “to seek the broadest possible consensus,” when it comes to the judicial reforms; a follow-up to his comments in March when he said, a “compromise” is needed. Back in March Netanyahu responded to those comments with seeming annoyance, noting that Israel is a “sovereign country” and rejects “pressure from abroad.” But the President then, like now, was not seeking to interfere in Israel’s domestic politics. Rather, he was implicitly reflecting his own Zionism; almost certainly concerned that if Israel no longer meaningfully shares the bedrock principle of democracy, over time, the US-Israel relationship will transform from one with few limits, into a much narrower one with a ceiling.

And that is the challenge of misalignment as a whole. Allies can always agree to disagree on policies. But when they begin to be out of sync on too many of them, it can threaten to alter the contours of the broader relationship, no matter how strong. Such a policy chasm is not going to jeopardize the U.S.-Israel relationship today; but if it continues and widens, it can in the future. 

At some point this year, Biden will probably meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. How it goes will depend on whether or not the US and Israel are better aligned. 

Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and the former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.

The views expressed are the author’s and do not imply endorsement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Intelligence Community, or any other U.S. government agency.

Image: Shutterstock.

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In the United States, attention toward recent improvements in South Korea-Japan relations focuses heavily on hard security cooperation vis-à-vis China. Indeed, the Biden administration has worked hard to encourage this. But closer Korea-Japan interaction—if sustained—could also have significant consequences in other areas, especially energy.

Few relationships are as complex and nuanced as the one between South Korea and Japan. The peoples of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago have interacted culturally and economically since ancient times. Nonetheless, Imperial Japan’s invasion and occupation of the peninsula (1910–1945) left behind many unresolved issues and painful historical memories for the Korean inhabitants.

The relationship between South Korea and Japan is bound to change as time passes. A 2022 poll conducted by Korea’s East Asia Institute and Japan’s Genron NGO has shown a sizable shift in opinion since South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s government took office in 2022. Compared to the previous year, respondents in both countries are more likely to express willingness to overcome problems in bilateral relations.

In addition, respondents in another poll said that the United States, Japan, and South Korea should strengthen military cooperation. This is due to the intensified nuclear threat from North Korea and the increased sensitivity to various challenges from China. Now, more people in the two countries believe that increased cooperation between Korea and Japan benefits the balance of power in Northeast Asia.

President Yoon and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida have reinstated so-called “shuttle diplomacy,” and follow-up consultations are underway at the working level. Beyond security discussions, talks on cooperation in the energy sector have resumed after a five-year hiatus; the last Korea-Japan bilateral energy dialogue was in 2018.

Lee Wonju, Director General for Energy Policy from South Korea’s MOTIE (Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy), and Minami Ryo, Deputy Commissioner for International Policy on Carbon Neutrality from Japan’s METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry), held a policy meeting on May 25, on the occasion of the World Climate Industry Expo 2023 in Busan. The officials discussed the need to strengthen energy policy coordination between the two countries, which share high dependence on energy imports and similar energy consumption patterns.

Seoul and Tokyo recognize the need to strengthen energy security and carbon neutrality measures amid the recent unstable energy market. Therefore, the two countries exchanged views on expanding carbon-free energy (CFE) and cooperation in strengthening stable energy supply chains for natural gas and minerals. METI announced the two sides had agreed to continue close communication to expand energy cooperation to various fields.

Korea and Japan have very similar energy concerns and dilemmas. Most importantly, Korea and Japan have built their economies through export-driven manufacturing. Since each country has minimal natural resources, their economic structures have made them highly dependent on imported energy and minerals. Therefore, any external energy crisis would seriously impact both countries. The two oil crises in the 1970s weakened their economies, and since then, both countries have been trying to diversify their energy sources by using natural gas and nuclear power. Nevertheless, maintaining a stable supply of imported energy remains a vital issue for both countries.

Second, both countries declared “2050 carbon neutrality” goals in October 2020 and legislated this goal domestically. Korea’s NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) under the Paris climate agreement calls for a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2018 levels by 2030. Japan has committed to reducing its emissions by 46 percent from 2013 levels in 2030. However, both countries have similar structural problems that will make meeting these targets quite difficult.

As mentioned above, both countries have manufacturing-oriented economies that are necessarily energy-intensive. Both depend heavily on fossil fuels for power generation and manufacturing, particularly in the steel sector. Korea relied on coal for 36 percent of its electricity generation and natural gas for 26 percent as of 2022. Japan also relies on coal and gas for over 70 percent of its electricity generation. Decarbonizing the power sector is an urgent task for both countries, which they can only accomplish by constructing more renewable or low-carbon power sources.

Innovation and advancements in grid and storage technologies are needed too. In South Korea, privatization rules power generation, but KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Corporation) still monopolizes distribution. However, KEPCO’s accumulated astronomical deficits (due in part to artificially low electricity prices) make it difficult to reinvest and innovate. Japan has struggled to restart its nuclear reactors since the infamous 2011 Fukushima meltdown.

Third, both countries share common demographic and socio-structural challenges, such as aged societies, low birth rates, declining populations, increasing single-person households, and rural decline. In South Korea, the proportion of single-person households exceeded 40 percent. In Japan, the number of single-person households is also increasing while the population is decreasing. As a result of these demographic shifts, the types of housing and energy consumption behaviors have changed significantly from the past. In addition, the gap between metropolitan and rural areas in both countries is widening, leading to social conflicts and problems in areas such as education and public health. The declining population in Korea and Japan accelerates the so-called “rural extinction” phenomenon. In such a desperate demographic situation, assuming high economic growth in formulating policy is impossible.

Given the above, Korea and Japan are suitable partners to share energy policy ideas and pursue cooperation. The most promising areas are natural gas, recycling and energy efficiency, nuclear safety, and new areas like hydrogen and smart grids.

Natural gas emits fewer harmful air pollutants than coal, and neither Korea nor Japan is likely to reduce consumption substantially anytime soon. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year increased fuel price volatility and concerns about the security of gas supplies. Korea and Japan have been paying the so-called “Asian premium,” buying gas at higher prices than the rest of the world, and are among the largest importers of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from their ally, the United States. Japan is more dependent on Russian LNG than South Korea because of its involvement in the Sakhalin project, where two major Japanese firms remain as investors. While Japan has joined the post-war sanctions against Russia, its firms have not withdrawn from the Sakhalin project, citing energy security.

But the competition for gas is becoming increasingly fierce. European countries seeking to escape Russia have significantly increased their imports of American LNG and LNG from the Middle East. Korea Gas Corporation and Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan have regrettably clashed over the Senoro gas field in Indonesia. However, the discussion should not stop there but rather continue to discuss ways to cooperate by learning from past failures. Korea and Japan, which have similar situations, need to work together to diversify their gas imports and find ways to increase their leverage with suppliers.

Therefore, since stable gas supplies are a crucial energy security matter for both countries, there is a high possibility that they will continue to compete. Still, it is worth trying to structure this competition and institutionalize bilateral cooperation to increase the bargaining power of the two countries vis-à-vis suppliers.

Resource recycling and energy efficiency are also areas where Korea and Japan can cooperate. In Europe, the so-called “battery passport” system, which digitizes information on the entire life cycle of batteries, is being promoted to increase the recycling rate of batteries from a circular economy perspective. This is also an area where Korea and Japan could exchange ideas and share policy approaches.

Furthermore, Korea and Japan can identify common areas for collaboration, such as nuclear safety, smart grids, future cities, and green hydrogen and ammonia supply chains. Hydrogen and ammonia will likely be essential for reducing emissions from each nation’s manufacturing sector.

For these collaborations to be possible, rebuilding trust between the two countries is essential. In particular, it is worth noting that the discharge of the Fukushima nuclear wastewater is prompting a raging political conflict in South Korea. This is, of course, because the political landscape is very divided and polarized. However, the fact that there is opposition in Korea, China, and even Japan shows that the Japanese nuclear industry and regulators have lost a lot of credibility. Korea is one of the most exemplary nuclear operating countries, so if Korea and Japan can further build trust and set high standards, starting with the nuclear sector, it will positively impact Northeast Asia and beyond.

Given the historic nature of the relationship between the two countries and the differences in the structure of their energy markets, it may be challenging to accelerate cooperation. However, if the two countries are willing to share policy ideas on common concerns and identify policy synergies, they can contribute to peace and economic prosperity in the region.

Eunjung Lim is an associate professor at the Division of International Studies, Kongju National University and a board member of the Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control.

Image: Shutterstock.