Getting the Vietnam Analogy Right in Afghanistan

The ghosts of the Vietnam War seem to be hanging around the White House Situation Room as President Barack Obama and his national security aides are debating a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, and in particular whether to deploy more U.S. troops to that country. Indeed, if to judge by their required reading list, Vietnam is very much on the minds of President Obama and other officials, lawmakers and pundits in Washington.

The headline above a recent report in The Wall Street Journal,"Behind the War Debate, a Battle of Two Books Rages," seem to illustrate the way supporters and opponents of increasing U.S. troop level in Afghanistan have been making use of what they see as the lessons of Vietnam, and applying them to the debates over the process of presidential national security policymaking and civilian-military relationship.

Hence, political scientist Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster which depicts a President Lyndon Johnson being pressed to escalate the war in Vietnam by a somewhat narrow-minded military is being cited by those skeptical about the recommendation by General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, to increase the number of troops there.

At the same time, military analyst Lewis Sorley's A Better War, which describes the administration of President Richard Nixon under public and Congressional pressure to get out of Vietnam and rejecting what could have become an effective counter-insurgency strategy by the military, is being touted by those who leaning in the direction of General McChrystal's recommendations.

Applying historical analogies à la "the lessons of..." to contemporary foreign policy dilemmas could certainly be instructive. As President Obama prepares to make his decisions in Afghanistan, he should consider the pitfalls faced by U.S. presidents, starting with John Kennedy as they tried to calibrate U.S. strategic choices in Vietnam by drawing on the input of their military and civilian advisors and juggling conflicting political pressures from the public, Congress and the bureaucracy.

But the historical analogies of Vietnam could become confusing if not misleading when one shifts the focus from the decision making processes to ideological premises of U.S. involvement the Cold War. In fact, Obama and his advisors should recall that as President Johnson and the members of his national security team were deliberating whether to expand U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, it was the specter Munich 1938 that was haunting Washington then, and that the lessons of British attempts to appease Nazi Germany's dictator Adolph Hitler were being employed in a way that seemed to be leaving the White House with no other choice but to hang tough and stay the course in Vietnam lest U.S. policymakers would be perceived as lacking the resolve to stand-up to Hitler-like aggressors.

The reason that the lessons of Munich in the context of World War II seemed be so relevant to U.S. policymakers during the Vietnam War taking place at the height of the Cold War was that American intervention in the two wars were driven by grand Manichean narratives in which a U.S.-led Western alliance was confronting a powerful global aggressor representing a threatening and dynamic ideology.

Indeed, for the American foreign policy establishment as well as for the general public, North Vietnam was perceived to be an integral part of a monolithic Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, including its Eastern European satellites, China and Cuba. The only serious debate in Washington was over the kind of mix of diplomacy and military force that the U.S. needed to employ in defending South Vietnam and confronting North Vietnam. And in that context, it wasn't difficult for the "hawks" in Washington to suggest that just like Czechoslovakia in 1938, South Vietnam was being threatened by a regional satellite of an antagonistic global adversary and thus required forceful American military support.

Recognizing that nationalism and not adherence to communist ideology or solidarity with the Soviet Union and China was the main driving force behind North Vietnamese policy could have changed the strategic calculations of policymakers in Washington. Indeed, the growing realization that there was no Soviet-led global communist bloc led to the U.S. opening to China -- which ended-up going to war against Vietnam -- and to the use of the "China Card" in dealing with the Soviet Union. And it helped accelerate U.S. détente with the Soviet Union as well West German rapprochement with Eastern Europe or "Ostpolitik."

In the aftermath of 9/11 and in the period leading to the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it seemed for a while as though President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors would be successful in constructing a new grand Manichean narrative that conceived of a U.S.-led West confronting a global Islamofascist threat or a Caliphate-in-the-making that allegedly included Al Qaeda, a radical Muslim-Sunni fundamentalist terrorist group; Taliban, an Afghani-Pashtun and Sunni-fundamentalist movement allied with U.S. partners, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; Iran, a Muslim-Shiite fundamentalist state and Hizbollah, a Lebanese-Arab Shiite movement as well as the secular Syrian Ba'ath regime and the Palestinian-Sunni Hamas movement, elected to power in a U.S.-sponsored election and a mish-mash of national and regional militant Muslim groups -- in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, and in places like Chechnya (Russia), Kashmir (India), and Xinjiang (China).

In a way, it was the costly and failed Iraq War that helped disprove the Islamofascist myth -- after all, the collapse of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban helped strengthen Iran -- and undermine the ideological premises of short-lived grand narrative that steered the U.S. into the war in Mesopotamia while preventing it from achieving its original and limited goals in Afghanistan (destroying Al Qaeda). Indeed, any serious discussion of the political realities in the Greater Middle East taking place in Washington today would have to assume that the U.S. has to deal today -- including in Afghanistan -- not with a unified and monolithic adversary or "axis" but with a hodgepodge of Muslim governments and movements that lack any shared ideology or common interests.

To apply the historical analogies here, the choices facing the U.S. in Afghanistan are unlike the dilemmas the U.S. confronted during the Vietnam War, in the same way that the "loss" of South Vietnam wasn't akin to the destruction of Czechoslovakia by Hitler's Germany. Even under a scenario under which the Taliban ends up controlling even more territory than it already does today, the impact on core U.S. national interest would be limited. Local and regional players (India, Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) would be forced to work together or separately to prevent the country from becoming a source of instability and a center of international terrorism. Hence, taking limited steps towards securing U.S. narrow goals of preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a military base should not be regarded as a new and dramatic chapter in a grand narrative but as a cost-effective exercise in fighting terrorism.

 

 

Follow Leon T. Hadar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/leonhadar

Comments

[Leon T. Hadar - Huffpost Blogger]

Re NATO and Afghanistan. There have been several news reports in recent days about "anxiety" and "concern" etc. among our allies in Europe over what they perceive to be Obama lack of resolve on Afghanistan, waiting for America to lead, etc. Well, the EU's economy is actually larger than that of the U.S. If they are so worried about Afghanistan, why don't they send more troops, and in any case, spend more on defense. Indeed, as one comment points out, one of the reason their health systems are so well-funded is because they don't spend a lot on defense.

[eileenflemingWAWA]

Oct. 1, 2009, Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories stated,

"The last 75 years that shows that military approaches do not succeed in successful political outcomes. America won every battle in Vietnam, but lost the war. The people running the government still subscribe to political realism; military power. Afghanistan proves militarism doesn't work, but we keep reinventing failure. We talk human rights but still engage in military interventions.

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1447&Itemid=225

In 1968 Chicago, Abbie Hoffman addressed the children of the '60's who had planned on spending the night in a city park after their long day of 'lobbying' at the Democratic Convention against the war on Vietnam.

Mayor Daly sent word to Abbie that the multitudes were not welcome in his park and the cops were on the way in, but Abbie stood up and quoted Christ:

"I send you out like little lambs into a wolves den. Remain as harmless as doves and cunning as snakes."

If the doves had consulted Webster's, they first would have had a laugh at the two words cunning is sandwiched between!

It has been said that as in Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, or America: the people of the land are much better than the leadership they currently live under.

What is needed is A Greater Awakening:

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=64&Itemid=195

[Robster]

The Taliban allowed Al-Qaeda to plot and execute the attack on the US. We demand our allies step up and side with us- the way we would and have in the past -with a real commitment. Say Europe gives 150,000 troops for the Afghan fight; and with an equal commitment from the US we can change things. Or the Taliban turn over the 911 leaders to us. There are many issues here, but to not punish an enemy and allow supposed allies to slink away is just wrong. If our allies won't commit then they really are no allies at all- not enemies, but not allies. We should pull out of NATO and remove all bases from Europe- use the money for a national health care system! The Europeans have dandy health care system s because they don't put money into defense; we include them in our defense umbrella instead- we pay for their health care systems indirectly.

[Mogamboguru]

You wrote - quote: "The Taliban allowed Al-Qaeda to plot and execute the attack on the US."

Wrong. 9 / 11 was planned and executed in Saudi-Arabia, Hamburg / Germany and Florida.

So what are you going to do? Bomb Saudi-Arabia, Hamburg and Florida?

Get a grip of reality, please!

[eileenflemingWAWA]

"You can't understand the Taliban without knowing about America's covert operations in the region in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan's administration, mainly through the CIA, used the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan subsequently used "channels built with U.S. money" to install in Afghanistan a friendly government -- the Taliban.

"W. Bush administration invaded the country and the U.S. ousted the Taliban, it installed Hamid Karzai as president and returned many of the old Islamist jihadis to power in his government.

"Thus...th­e United States sponsored both sides.

"...the local Pashtun population has turned out to fight against the foreign invaders, side by side with the Taliban (who, it should be remembered, are mostly local Pashtuns). They're as fed up as anybody with the puppet Karzai....­they say Karzai has done nothing for the people. But saddled with history, Karzai remains the horse the U.S. rode in on.

"Only the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called for a moral accounting. Its surveys of Afghan citizens consistently find that the people want lasting peace, and to attain it, they would prefer some sort of truth and reconciliation procedure, like the one that took place in South Africa, to cleanse the country and set it on an honest intellectual and moral footing."

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1343&Itemid=222

[dogman44]

An important read for understand our involvement and mistakes is Steve Coll's
"Ghost Wars".