President Biden’s announcement in April, and again in his first State of the Union address, that the U.S. military will be withdrawing from Afghanistan must have seemed to many Americans to be an inflection point. But if pulling out of Afghanistan is thought to mark an end to the post‑9/​11 wars, think again.

Almost as soon as Biden could give the official orders to withdraw, reporting clarified that the new policy was by no means equivalent to ending the war. “With withdrawal preparations ramping up,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March, “U.S. military commanders want bases for troops, drones, bombers and artillery to shore up the Afghan government, keep the Taliban insurgency in check and monitor other extremists.” These military assets were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan and simply repositioned to neighboring Central Asian countries or to nearby Arab states in the Persian Gulf.

That sort of sounds like a continuation of the mission from non‐​Afghan soil. Though, even that formulation may be too generous: the New York Times reports that U.S. spy agencies are hard at work cultivating proxies inside Afghanistan in preparation for a Taliban offensive to seize control of the country. Is this an inflection point or a shift in tactics?

More significantly, Afghanistan is only one of the lingering “Global War on Terror” military missions the Biden administration is continuing to pursue. The United States is engaged in some level of active hostilities in roughly a dozen countries. In none of these disparate theaters does the United States face a clear and present national security threat, but the executive branch will apparently continue these quiet military missions so long as it has the legal authority to do so.

Congress is in the process of repealing old authorizations for the use of force. Bills to repeal AUMFs from 1957 and 1991 have passed committee in the House while committees in both the House and Senate have voted to move forward on repealing the 2002 AUMF, which authorized the Iraq War. Unfortunately, most members of Congress who support repealing the 2001 AUMF — the very authorization that enables America’s so‐​called Forever Wars — also support replacing it with another, updated AUMF that will effectively codify anew all of America’s ongoing missions. And in a sign of acknowledgment that the 2001 AUMF has been abused, some members are keen to include language intended to impose constraints on executive war powers that the broad text of the original failed to do.

My colleague Gene Healy and I explain in Defense One why it is a bad idea replace the 2001 AUMF and prolong the wayward War on Terror:

Unfortunately, President Biden and most of Congress aren’t interested in simply repealing the 2001 AUMF. They want to repeal and replace it with a new authorization broad enough to underwrite ongoing operations across the broader Middle East, from Libya to Pakistan. The danger of a replacement AUMF is that it will amount to hitting reset on a 20‐​year conflict, serving as congressional blessing for another multigenerational war.

Moreover, any authority Congress grants will likely be stretched still further by future presidents. Biden himself should be attuned to that danger. As a Senator, just after voting for the 2001 AUMF, he insisted the resolution was nothing like the Vietnam War’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: “We do not say pell‐​mell, ‘Go do anything, any time, any place.’” The 2001 AUMF has now been in effect over three times as long as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and it’s morphed into the boundless grant of power then‐​Senator Biden disclaimed.

…Americans should be skeptical of the claim that these alleged threats demand open‐​ended authority for waging war against disparate militant groups in multiple countries. The 9/11 attacks were an outlier event, not the arrival of a new normal. Since September 2001, an average of six people in America per year are killed by Islamic‐​inspired terrorism. Self‐​radicalized “lone‐​wolves” are a bigger risk factor than jihadists with operational connections to any of the myriad militant groups American forces are fighting overseas.

…The sprawling, low‐​intensity warfare such a policy demands entangles us deeper into local problems extraneous to American security…Under the logic of the global war on terror, policymakers have lost sight of the distinction between distant regional violence and a direct threat to the United States.

The end of the war in Afghanistan presents Congress with an historic opportunity to break that cycle. No current threat remotely justifies roving presidential authority to wage war on multiple continents. To end the Forever War, end the Forever Authorization.

Read the full article here. Gene and I made a similar case in the New York Times a few years ago to repeal and not replace the 2001 AUMF.