More than 12 years ago, Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Since then, it has been used as justification for dozens of actions, including operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in 2013 alone. As Heather Hurlburt wrote in her feature essay “Battlefield Earth” in our Winter Issue, 2014 will likely be the year when debate re-emerges on the future of the AUMF.
What should Congress do? But more fundamentally, with whom are we at war, and what actions should be allowable against those groups?
On January 13th, Democracy co-hosted a panel on these questions with the New America Foundation’s National Security Program. Appearing alongside Hurlburt were Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Micah Zenko, the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation moderated.
The event was also covered by C-SPAN 2, whose coverage you can see here.
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