Michael Cohen sees my anxiety over Obama’s detention powers and asks:

If progressives are rightfully up in arms over these civil liberties issues . .  why is none of the same sort of venom being directed at escalation in Afghanistan, which in many ways is predicated on the same toxic “war on terrorism” narrative that led to these, continuing, rule of law and human rights abuses. These  violations are the logical outgrowth of a 9-year obsessive focus on terrorism as the most serious challenge facing the country – and escalation in Afghanistan, at the cost of $100 billion and 100,000 ground troops, as the central front in the war on terror only continues the process. For all of the pretty words in Obama’s recent West Point speech about expanding and promoting democracy and building a better world the lion’s share of our foreign aid increases and foreign policy attention is still going to three countries – Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He clarifies that he “really hope[s] this won’t produce an aggrieved response from Spencer.” What a killjoy…

So I won’t speak for any progressive except myself here — if Michael wants progressives who are just as pissed off about Afghanistan as they are about civil liberties, may I recommend the rest of the FDL family? — but I’ll try to offer a couple of answers.

First: permanence. I have no idea when the Afghanistan war will end, let alone how. The end of the extended surge in July 2011 is only going to be the beginning of a transition to Afghan security control. But it will end, even if it ends with a long-term diplomatic and economic relationship to Afghanistan. But the history of the security state is a history of expansion. Obama deserves credit for renouncing CIA torture. But look at what’s retained: military commissions; indefinite detention without charge; the never-to-actually-sunset Patriot Act; the overbroad surveillance authorized under the FISA Amendments Act. These are emergency powers that never expire when emergencies do. My friend Eli Lake made a powerful case that the Obama administration is using the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, a terse and barely-debated act of Congress short of an act of war, like an Egypt-style emergency law. In short, when this stuff goes on the books, it recasts the relationship between liberty and security — among the most basic compacts of American citizenship — and it’s extremely difficult to overturn.

Second: legitimacy. The Afghanistan war suffered from lost years of mismanagement, strategic inattention and insufficient resourcing. But it only exists because an Afghanistan-based extremist network attacked the United States. The occasional pipeline conspiracy theorist aside, we’re not in Afghanistan because we wanted to be. This isn’t an unprovoked war and occupation like Iraq. The International Security Assistance Force — the NATO military command in Afghanistan — operates under  specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council. Notice that I’m not making a point about the wisdom of current strategy here. This is a point about legitimacy to answer Michael’s question. By contrast, surveillance without a basis of individualized suspicion and indefinite detention without charge are incompatible with the Constitution.

Third, it’s true that 9/11 is the wellspring of both the Afghanistan war and abrogations of civil liberties. But it doesn’t follow that escalation in Afghanistan “continues the process” of overbroad surveillance or indefinite detention without charge or the Patriot Act or military commissions. Indeed, the sad truth is that all of those civil-liberties abrogations is that the imbalance between liberty and security will endure far beyond the Afghanistan war, as they will after the Iraq war ends. The Parwan detention facility will transfer by the end of this year, months before the extended surge ends in July 2011. There is simply no relationship in any rigorous sense between escalation in Afghanistan, or the war itself, and these civil-liberties measures. Michael may just want to give that contention a shave and a haircut.

So those are three reasons why the civil liberties stuff is more obnoxious to me than Afghanistan. Notice that all three are agnostic on Afghanistan strategy, which ought to be dealt with on its own merits and its relationship to the national interest. Michael asked a comparative question and so I’ve attempted a comparative answer.