I’ve spent a good part of the last week re-reading Neil Sheehan’s book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Partly, this is just happenstance; I found a nicely annotated hardback copy in a local used book store. But it’s also because I wanted to look again at the 1962-64 period of the Vietnam War to see how much it resembles our current situation in Afghanistan. I don’t have good news to report.
Starting in earnest in 1962, the U.S. began arming the Viet Cong inadvertently through the strategic hamlet and strategic outpost programs. The communist side in the South was not relying on Chinese or Soviet supplies, except for heavy weapons that could not easily be captured. They got all the guns and ammo they needed simply by taking them from the people the U.S. handed them out to. The strategic hamlet program turned the peasants against the Saigon regime for good. Indiscriminate bombing of villages turned the rural populace into mortal foes of the United States. The cities were lost because the Catholic regime was brutal, corrupt, and attempted to crush the power of the Buddhist leadership.
The parallels to Afghanistan are not perfect, but the situations have enough commonality to give serious pause. The most worrisome feature is the corruption and illegitimacy of the Karzai Regime. If this was 1963, our ambassador would be plotting a coup to make sure Karzai and his opium-selling brother were assassinated and replaced by a (hopefully) more competent and popular successor. But, with hindsight, we know that that gambit didn’t save South Vietnam and it probably wouldn’t save Afghanistan either.
Another commonality is the weakness of the Afghan National Army. Like the ARVN before it, the Afghan Army is losing the countryside to a more determined and dedicated foe. It’s undermanned, most of its troops are AWOL, and it serves a corrupt and incompetent government. We tried to turn the ARVN into a lethal fighting force for two decades, and we failed. If the Afghan Army is going to turn out better, we need to know why.
Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama has to take over the war planning from a previous president. He still has some of the same advisers that Bush relied upon. He’s being urged to make a major investment in troops to salvage a deteriorating situation. It’s no wonder he’s just rejected all of the options presented to him by his national security team. Obama is demanding the kinds of answers that were never answered in 1964-65 when the decision was made to escalate in Vietnam. Namely, how are these investments going to change the basic reality that the central government is weak, corrupt, and illegitimate?
Now, the one big difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam is that the Taliban are not considered to be heroes like Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh armies were by the Vietnamese. The Taliban don’t have nationwide legitimacy, and they are openly feared and loathed by most of the Afghan population. In that sense, we can be sure that we aren’t fighting on the wrong side of this war. But we can’t be sure that we will be any more successful, because there is little evidence that we can be at any realistic price.
I hope Obama holds out until he has a plan that makes sense and has a definite end point.
I am afraid that Obama’s only real option is to get out and the sooner the better, like NOW! Granted the Taliban are not the national heroes the VC were, but, by the time we are done, they well may be. The new empire builder in Southwest Asia is not Japan but the US. It is our soldiers and our droids and our bombs that support a corrupt administration (Karzai) for our own imperialist purposes – oil, pipe lines, military bases. It is our weaponry that is killing innocent civilians and it is our civilization that will bear the costs of this LBJ like venture.
It will take great courage and remarkable wisdom to pull out of Afghanistan but such qualities are sometimes necessary to preserve a mighty nation. Sure hope our current president is up to speed and can meet our historical challenges.
News from last night indicates Obama is possibly looking for a timetable for withdrawal.
If this is accurate, it’s good news. Maybe we’ll finally get the hell out.
I haven’t read “A Bright Shining Lie” so I’m not sure what the slant of the author is, but it wasn’t just the President immediately preceding Johnson. The US was involved in Indochina from when the Japanese surrendered it in WWII. Truman. First, to prop up the French colonial rule, then to bifurcate the country and prop up the Diem puppet regime (Eisenhower), then to inject as many troops as possible to win an unwinnable war (Johnson).
If you want to understand the CIA torture programs today and the uptick in terror planned for Afghanistan, read Doug Valentine’s “The Phoenix Program”. Not for the squeamish.
I would also add that Afghanistan is not a result of just the President immediately preceding Obama. The entire Cold War was part of a rollback strategy to take back countries (and their economic wealth) from the Communists. American oil interests lost their holdings of the oilfields around Baku with the Russian Revolution and one of their long-term goals was to get hold of those resources again.
Before Bush, during the Clinton Administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Democrats’cold warrior, was negotiating for that pipeline across Afghanistan. And who was al Qaeda and Osama? They were formerly known as “freedom fighters” created and financed by the CIA and the House of Saud to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
So the rationale for those two wars was created by a band of CIA terrorists and a lone nut employee of the Department of Defense who sent out anthrax letters when no one was looking.
The bigger question is why the military has the audacity to dictate these wars when the clear majority of Americans want out. Why? What would Truman have done with McChrystal? Something happened in the balance of power between Truman and Obama, something that apparently happened by the time that Johnson began elevating troop levels.
Think hard, everyone. What happened to America?
True comments. I now live in Thailand where the generals regularly interfere in politics and what I see in the US while not reaching the same level is surprisingly no that alien from what I see here although our generals may be a bit more inept than Thai ones 😉
McChrystal is a public servant and not a very good one at that. He should be replaced.
I recommend reading this interview with Juan Cole:
http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14540
Among other points he makes, we need to stop referring to the Taliban as if it’s one cohesive whole. Much of the land supposedly controlled now by the Taliban, he says, isn’t even really Taliban.
yeah, I know that the term ‘Taliban’ is a bit of a catch-all phrase that can be misleading.
Interesting real-time reporting from Spence Ackerman.
Seems that Eikenberry is not impressed with Petraeus’s end run of McChrystal’s request through the media. There are also reports that Gen. Casey is not impressed either.
It seems to me that Obama asked the proponents of various strategy options to address the questions raised by the Powell doctrine:
I believe that what he got back was the usual bureaucratic bullshit Powerpoints. And he called out the bullshit for what it was. Having graded their homework an F, Prof. Obama has sent his students back to redo their papers.
It also has the advantage of taking away the dithering Hamlet charge. It is not Obama who is dithering.
That is exactly my take. He asked them, ‘how does this thing work,’ and they couldn’t give him a straight answer because there isn’t any. Clinton was smart, but he was playing a weak hand because he never had a majority of the population vote for him, especially the first time out. Obama has a stronger position. He is definitely not afraid of these guys. Let’s hope is security force is top-notch, though, or he might end up like JFK.
Any serious consideration of point three means short of reintroducing the draft it cannot be achieved, and even with that maybe not. That however should have been known before the invasion.
I wonder if Obama is willing to make the right decisons and risk being a heroic one term president or if he will make the political calculations that will mean further suffering and also maybe end up being a one term president but without any heroics.
“In that sense, we can be sure that we aren’t fighting on the wrong side of this war.”
Yes, in the sense that the Taliban are not widely regarded as popular heroes, but on the other hand, the Afghanis really, really don’t want us there either.
When you consider how things really work in this country, you can see that Obama simply cannot buck the Pentagon head on. That being said, I think he’s handling it very well. As you note, “Obama is demanding the kinds of answers that were never answered in 1964-65 when the decision was made to escalate in Vietnam. Namely, how are these investments going to change the basic reality that the central government is weak, corrupt, and illegitimate?”
That puts a lot of the onus back here it belongs, on the US military hawks.
“Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama has to take over the war planning from a previous president. He still has some of the same advisers that Bush relied upon.”
Why should U.S. officials have believed that (South) Vietnam could or should become a successful reliable client-state of the U.S.? And, decades later and inlight of yet more numerous examples of how such expectations have proven again and again to be error-ridden, why today would there be such expectations of the Afghan regime(s), past, present or future?
Your picking up and reading this work of Sheehan was a great idea! Like David Halberstam’s The Best and the Bightest, it has much of value for understanding the situation today.