While working as Hau Nghia province representative for USAID in 1965, retired Lt. Col. John Paul Vann wrote the following letter to General Robert York:
If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government. There is a revolution going on in this country–and the principles, goals, and desires of the other side are much closer to what Americans believe in than those of GVN [the Saigon Government]. I realize that ultimately, when the Chinese brand of Communism takes over, that these “revolutionaries” are going to be sadly disappointed–but then it will be too late–for them; and too late for us to win them. I am convinced that, even though the National Liberation Front is Communist-dominated, that the great majority of the people supporting it are doing so because it is their only hope to change and improve their living conditions and opportunities. If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice–whether to support the GVN or NLF–and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan, pg. 524.
Vann was one of the few Americans who were clear-eyed about the situation on the ground in Vietnam as our forces started arriving in huge numbers during the escalation of 1965. But even he suffered from erroneous assumptions. He believed that we had a strategic imperative to deny South Vietnam to the Chinese. We didn’t. And the North Vietnamese had no intention of allowing the Chinese to dominate them. We were escalating to save a government that wasn’t worth saving, and for strategic purposes that didn’t even exist.
We now face a similar choice in Afghanistan. We know that Karzai’s government is undeserving of Afghans’ loyalty. We know that they are corrupt. We know that their army is a paper tiger. The question, then, is if we have some overriding strategic imperative to prop up this government and train this army. It seems to me that we need to reexamine our assumptions about the enemy there. If the following is true, we need to be honest with ourselves about it.
Indeed, the intelligence reports say the Taliban movement that harbored the Al Qaeda terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is responsible for only a small share of the rising attacks – mostly in southern Afghanistan, according to the officials…
…US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States because it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.
In 1965, US Commanders and politicians often loosely referred to the resistance in Vietnam as pawns of Communist China. They were wrong. And, because they were wrong, we were making a major commitment to prevent something that was never going to happen. Our national security was never threatened by Ho Chi Minh.
Also in 1965, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John McNaughton, wrote the following memo for Bob McNamara, explaining the justification for escalating the war.
70%–To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputations as a guarantor)
20%–To keep SVN (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands.
10%–To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
That was a depressingly candid assessment of our priorities, and helps explain why we were willing to destroy villages in order to save them. What’s interesting is how high a priority our establishment put on saving face. We didn’t want to let South Vietnam go down the drain because it would lead other countries to question our ability to guarantee their security. As Vann had asserted, Vietnam was just a pawn in a larger East-West confrontation. The parallel for our own times is in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. If we abandon Afghanistan, what conclusions will Kuwait, or Qatar, or Oman, or Bahrain, make about our security arrangements with them?
There could be similar implications for our relationships with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. This is the kind of stinking-thinking that got 58,000 Americans killed in Indochina. During the Cold War, we could at least comfort ourselves with the belief that this kind of neo-imperialism was saving people from communist-domination. In the post-Cold War era, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is a thin reed to cling to in justifying what is more accurately described as a desire to sell advanced weaponry and service contracts to new client states.
If we are not really fighting fundamentalists in Afghanistan, then we can’t cite that as our reason for escalation. We have to realistically, and honestly, assess our national security interests. We are in danger of failing to do that. We cannot afford to make the same mistake twice.
Maybe, we can’t afford to make the same mistake twice but we are in the process of so doing so. This penchant of making fundamental errors repeatedly is the kind of thing that brings empires to their knees. Concerning the decline and fall of the American Empire, just check the value of the US dollar vis a vis other currencies in the world. It’s like watching a financial EKG; one that is becoming more and more erratic. Guess our imperial pulse rate is connected to all those mistakes that we keep making.
American’s don’t seem to learn the lessons of anything.
nalbar
it is refreshing to see the use of history as a justifivation for current or projected behavior. now, all that is necessary is for some one, any one to discover aladins’ lamp and rub it. and have the knowledge to ask the genie that appears to grant just one wish- please make the current authorities learn from the errors of the past.
good liuk!
One of the ways the parallel breaks down is that the US in the Vietnam era could still see itself as “policeman of the world”, “leader of the free world”, etc. Now we are no longer the world’s largest economy, the dollar has fallen drastically, and our debt is in the hands of other countries.
We can no longer afford to play at being supercop unless we choose to become a gigantic national version of Blackwater. I have to think Obama is taking that into account as he deliberates our next Afghanistan move. The old temptations will still be there and pushed hard by the old military-corporate forces, but the disastrous consequences of continuing to go it alone (or with NATO or some ad hoc “coalition”) have never been starker. I think we’re fortunate that this pivot point comes with Obama at the helm — he’s the best strategic thinker we’ve had in high places in some time. And the most thoughtful.
The other day when it was leaked that Obama had rejected all of the options that his crew had offered him, what surprised me most was what options they did not offer him – (a) to start any kind of withdrawal or (b) to do nothing. Reportedly, the only options given were different levels of escalation – all with no exit strategy or path to a “victory.”
Maybe it’s time that some heads roll in that commission or council that gives him these options. Too many old-time-thinkers in the group. The neo-cons still dominate in the defense/intelligence arenas and Obama could be fighting some internal battles with them for a while. And the press wonders where all of the leaks are coming from…
Fifteen years after the Vietnam war ended I remember discussing the revisionist theory that was emerging with my Uncle who was in the US House of Representatives. He was adamant that Vietnam was a nationalist struggle for the North and its supporters, far more than it was about communism…and that history would show that despite conservative efforts to rewrite history books before the ink had barely dried.
In the Daily Beast article Obama’s ‘Smart Power’ Play, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lewis Simons writes:
It was much the same in Vietnam. Remember the “domino theory?” If we “allowed” the South to fall to the communist North, we were told again and again by a succession of American presidents, the neighboring nations of Southeast Asia would follow suit. One after another, they would tumble before the Red Menace. All the East would turn red. It would not be long before we would be fighting them on the beaches of San Diego.
Americans failed to understand–or chose to ignore–that the Vietnamese communists also were Vietnamese nationalists. We did not recognize their goal to unite their divided country. We did not fathom that Vietnam’s bitter differences with communist China were centuries long and deep. We did not accept that China’s differences with communist Russia were just as significant.
It takes a permanent occupation to quell a nationalist movement and even that is never 100% successful. The purpose morphs into one that necessitates staying until they welcome the government made possible by our occupation. But the general will never want the one that will cooperate with us.
Funny how if you listen to the pundits and talking heads the opposition always is always characterized by broad bush strokes and oversimplified with some label. There never is a realiistic discussion of what they are fighting for and our ultimate reasons are always left vague and murky or worse still, misrepresented.
What Vietnam and other nations were (are) fighting for was (is) freedom from American coercion. We have become what England was in 1776 and what we sought then, is what they seek now – independence! What Americans seem most reluctant to face is that we are the enemy to countries that prize their sovereignty. Our national behavior is the oldest defense mechanism in the book. It is called denial.
Now it’s my turn to say:
your comment is one of the best, sharpest, insights I’ve read on any blog in a long, long while. It’s at the core of much of my current reading and thinking about what’s driving the ills of our time.
Good for you for recognizing and writing one of the most important and most overlooked truths.