When President Bush announced the commencement of military operations in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the campaign was seen as a clearly justified response to the horrific attacks of 9/11. It was narrowly targeted on those responsible for the attacks, and it had three specific goals: to punish al Qaeda and degrade its ability to carry out future attacks; to punish and drive from power the Taliban regime that had harbored al Qaeda; and to send a clear message to every other country in the world: If you support those who have killed Americans, and who wish to kill more, you will do so at your own peril.

The Afghan war enjoyed overwhelming public support at the time. It doesn’t any longer. The public mood has shifted not because the original war aims were unjust—they were not—but rather because our war aims have changed, and they bear little resemblance to those that guided the U.S. military in late 2001 and early 2002.

Few Americans could have imagined in October 2001 that there would be nearly 100,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan 10 years later. Few at the time would have supported a war that would cost more than $100 billion annually, as our current operations do.

As we look back over the last decade of war, we should be grateful for the sacrifices of our troops and their families. We should honor their service by remembering why they were sent to Afghanistan in the first place and by recommitting ourselves, and them, to a goal that is both achievable and essential. Tragically, the current mission is neither.

We lack the power, the wisdom, or the patience to create a functioning nation-state in Afghanistan. We need not do so in order to keep al Qaeda on the run. The 100,000 U.S. troops stationed there were essentially irrelevant to the assault that killed Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan, and they are equally unnecessary in nearly all of the other operations conducted against al Qaeda over the past 10 years. The organization has been severely weakened and bin Laden’s killing could have served as a useful bookend to bringing the long war in Afghanistan to a suitable close.

It still can. Ten years is long enough. It is time to end the open-ended nation-building mission in Afghanistan and to bring our troops home.

The all-too-early death of Steve Jobs was reported on the day that President Obama made another defense of his so-called jobs bill. Which one actually benefited (or would benefit) Americans and the American economy? Lots of people have talked about the way Steve Jobs changed technology, changed business, changed the world. And I trust there’ll be no more churlish complaints about his alleged lack of philanthropy. As Dan Pallotta definitively pointed out,

What a loss to humanity it would have been if Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best.… [T]he world has no greater philanthropist than Steve Jobs. If ever a man contributed to humanity, here he is.

Two years ago Portfolio magazine did a great graphic on “The Steve Jobs Economy,” trying to assess just how much value he himself had created for the economy. The conclusion: Jobs’s personal wealth at the time was estimated at $5.7 billion. But he was generating $30 billion a year in revenue for Apple, its partners, and its competitors (who were spurred to get better). Here’s the analysis (sorry for the imperfect tear sheet):

Click image to enlarge. And for text but not graphics at Portfolio, click here.

According to Portfolio and the experts it consulted, Jobs was producing $30 billion a year in value for various companies. And of course that means that consumers believed they were getting at least that much value themselves, or they wouldn’t buy the products. That’s a wealth creator. And that number pales in comparison to this one: After returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs took the total value of the company from about $2 billion to $350 billion.

How much value is the Post Office creating this year? Or Amtrak? Or Solyndra? And if you point out that the Post Office does create value for its customers even though it loses money every year, I would ask, how much more value might its competitors create, if it allowed competition?

Instead of another bag of taxpayers’ money for state and local governments and politically favored businesses, a real jobs program would encourage the next Steve Jobs to create value. What would that involve? Keep taxes on investment and creativity low. Reduce the national debt and its threat of huge tax hikes to come. Ease the burdens of regulation, especially regulations that make it difficult to open a business, hire and keep the best employees, and develop new ideas. Open the huge, stagnant postal and schooling businesses to competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Repeal some of the licensing laws that now afflict 1,100 occupations. Renew progress toward free trade. Make it smart for businesses to invest their time, money, and brainpower in productive activity, not lobbying.

During Wednesday’s oral argument in Golan v. Holder (transcript here), Justice Scalia said something that was at once obvious and startling: 

It seems to me Congress either had the power to do this under the Copyright Clause or it didn’t. I don’t think that powers that Congress does not have under the Constitution can be acquired by simply obtaining the agreement of the Senate, the President and Zimbabwe. I do not think a treaty can expand the powers of the Federal government. 

This proposition is obvious, because the Constitution vests Congress with limited, enumerated powers, which can only be increased by constitutional amendment, not by treaty. But Scalia’s words were also startling because Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said exactly the opposite almost a century ago—or at least that’s how his opinion has been read—in the canonical case of Missouri v. Holland. We filed a brief arguing that Holmes was wrong, and we are delighted that Justice Scalia agrees.

Thanks to Tim Lee for pointing out this exchange to me before I had a chance to read the transcript and to Georgetown’s Nick Rosenkranz, the principal author of our brief.

David Frum knows that ObamaCare can’t be repealed. But don’t worry, he also knows how to make it palatable to Republicans:

1. Move up the start date of ObamaCare’s state waiver program from 2017 to 2014. As I explain here, that program will only produce alternatives to ObamaCare that are equally or more anti-market, such as a single-payer system. Frum wants that to happen sooner.
2. Raise taxes, on everybody. I swear I am not making that up.
3. Replace ObamaCare’s individual mandate with an equally coercive tax credit that accomplishes the same thing, but which the courts would probably uphold. Bra-vo. Frum implies it is necessary to “work around” the fact that Republicans are not “entirely rational” when it comes to the individual mandate. (True, but they’re getting more rational all the time.)
4. Republicans should embrace government rationing of health care. Frum counsels Republicans to “unleash the cost controllers” and become the “green eyeshade party willing to do the disagreeable work of squeezing waste from the system.” How? Well, he doesn’t call for Medicare vouchers, under which enrollees would ration their own care. In fact, he has thrown cold water on that idea. But the only alternative is to have the government ration care. And Frum makes no distinctions between the elderly and non-elderly, which leads me to believe he wants Republicans to ration care to the under-65 crowd too. Slap that on a bumper sticker!

In sum, Frum’s GOP-palatable alternative to ObamaCare is … ObamaCare. But maybe more coercive. And implemented sooner. With higher taxes. And less vulnerable to legal challenges. And with Republicans playing the bad guy.

Frum laments that Republicans mistakenly threw away the opportunity to work with Democrats to implement these brilliant ideas in 2009 and 2010. But Republicans did so because these brilliant ideas hurt people. They were wrapped into a bill called ObamaCare, and Republicans rejected it. They were right to do so. And they are right that ObamaCare can’t be fixed.

(Related: Ramesh Ponnuru previously took down Ross Douthat’s ideas for fixing ObamaCare.)

(Also related: CNN has signed Frum to provide conservative commentary during the 2012 election.)

The United States executed its original mission in Afghanistan in the critical first months after the invasion: cripple al Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power. Now that the United States has expanded its mission to a fragile-by-design strategy of nation-building, it’s well past time for U.S. forces to leave.

In a new video Austin Bragg and I produced, Cato Institute vice president for defense and foreign policy studies Christopher A. Preble, foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent, and legal policy analyst David Rittgers comment on this dubious milestone:

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing yesterday on President Obama’s pledge to go “page by page, line by line” through the federal budget to eliminate programs “we don’t need.” I testified with an ideologically diverse group of budget experts.

My testimony can be read here, but the following are the key points:

• Assuming that OMB did conduct a line-by-line review of the federal budget, the president’s first budget proposal implied that he believed that 99.53 percent of the federal government was definitely needed. Subsequent recommendations for savings released with the president’s annual budget proposals in 2010 and 2011 have offered a similarly insignificant offering of spending cuts.

• The president’s list of savings created an aura of thoroughness because it targeted some obscure programs. For example, the proposed savings included terminating tiny programs like the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation ($1 million) and the Javits Gifted and Talented Education Program ($7 million).

• My experiences as an Indiana state budget official taught me that political leaders are good at generating sound bites designed to make taxpayers believe that their interests come first. In reality, taxpayer interests usually end up taking a back seat to the interests of select individuals or groups.

• Cato has conducted its own page-by-page, line-by-line review of the federal budget and posted the results on our website, www​.Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org.

• Policymakers need to do more than simply pledge to “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse” in government programs. It’s time to cut “meat,” not just “fat.” If President Obama isn’t serious about terminating unneeded federal programs, then it’s up to Congress to do the job for him.

Had I to do over, I would have put more emphasis on that last sentence in my oral testimony. The “liberal” representative, Scott Lilly from the Center for American Progress, and “centrist” budget guru, Stan Collender, did the best job of pointing out that it’s Congress that needs to be doing the “page-by-page, line-by-line” review of the federal budget.

Much of the hearing consisted of Republicans and Democrats trying to score political points on each other. That’s just the way it is and it’ll never change, which is another reason why the American people should reconsider placing so much power and control over our lives in the hands of a select group of fallible human beings.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a warning to NATO allies that reducing military spending on both sides of the Atlantic will risk “hollowing out” the alliance’s capabilities. Panetta implied that Europeans cannot continue to rely on the United States for their security. Following former defense secretary Robert Gates’s comments in June, Panetta joins the long list of U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense and state, and innumerable lower-level officials who have pleaded with Europe to pick up the slack on military spending, provide for their own security, and close the gap in capabilities.

But Secretary Panetta’s speech also praised NATO for the mission in Libya and he extolled Europe’s leadership in the campaign: “The alliance achieved more burden-sharing between the U.S. and Europe than we have in the past…on a mission that was in the vital interest of our European allies.”

Relative to past NATO operations, it may be true that Europe contributed more in this instance. But this ignores the fact that the mission would not have been possible without the unique capabilities of the U.S. military. As Justin Logan pointed out, the Europeans quickly ran out of munitions and relied on the United States to conduct air strikes. “Thus, Washington essentially borrowed money from China to buy ordnance to give to Europe to drop on Libya.”

Panetta’s finger-wagging will do little to alter the incentive structure European states confront when determining what they should spend on defense. As I explain in an article recently published at Big Peace, until the United States takes concrete steps to force Europeans to spend more for their security, they will continue to free-ride on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime.

Cutting the Pentagon’s budget without imposing additional burdens on our troops requires getting our allies to do more. That is unlikely to happen unless U.S. officials, beginning with Secretary Panetta, force the issue. Unfortunately, he is merely one of many in Washington who seem to forget how incentives work:

Those who simply assume that others would not do more to defend themselves and their interests often ignore the extent to which U.S. actions have discouraged them from doing so. Just as some welfare recipients are often disinclined to look for work, foreign countries on the generous American security dole do not see a need to obtain military power. Our great power, and our willingness to use it, even when our own interests are not at stake, has allowed others to ignore possible threats, always confident that the United States will be there to rescue them.

The Obama administration’s rhetoric merely reinforces this message. The National Security Strategy, published in May 2010, declares “There should be no doubt: the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security.” Taking their cue, U.S. allies have proved understandably disinterested in military spending.

Despite Panetta’s pleas, U.S. strategy—and NATO’s very existence—allows this free-riding to continue. The Libya operation appears to have reinforced these destructive tendencies. If Washington really wants our allies to spend more to defend themselves and their vital interests, U.S. officials must jettison their reflexive attachment to the NATO alliance, an organization that has been irrelevant to U.S. vital security interests for at least two decades.

Secretary Panetta understands the United States is dealing with its own fiscal problems, but he has missed a perfect opportunity to offload a share of our burdens on to our rich allies.