[NOTE: With Monday Indigenous Peoples' Day, this blog is almost a confession of U.S. sins against the Vietnamese and Afghani peoples. And against ourselves; we did not "pledge ... our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor"; we betrayed them.]
I would put Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers on my shelf with books on the Vietnam War but shall send it instead to my ex-son-in-law, a native Pakistani, now a naturalized American. His reading will differ from mine. He will respond to the cultural, social, political, religious, and economic dynamics of the area. I respond, déjà vu, to the political and military similarities of the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Everyone has cited the major similarities between the two wars in terms of domestic politics and military performance: the United States lost both wars, caused the death and maiming of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese and Afghani civilians and soldiers, and squandered not only resources better spent on anything else, but also opportunities to promote peace in Southeast and Southwest Asia. Typically, it fought the wars for the wrong reasons and then with the wrong strategies and the wrong tactics. Throughout, the White House and Executive Branch departments and agencies lied about everything about the wars: body counts, soldiers’ deaths by friendly fire or civilian deaths from misdirected bombs; the use of torture; corrupt in-country politicians and venal U.S. contractors; etc. Perhaps worst of all are flag officers who directed troops to risk their lives in the service of their country and misled or lied to Congress to avoid risk to their careers by speaking the truth. Every one of those flag officers involved with Afghanistan at home or abroad should be busted and dishonorably discharged.
The similarities suggest that the military service academies teach military history in order to repeat its mistakes. Clearly, academy graduates learned nothing about fighting insurgencies in foreign countries (see endnote). Lesson one: be true to American beliefs in national territorial integrity, self-determination, and democratic processes; ensure that our political and military actions comport with those beliefs. Lesson two: have a legitimate rationale for involvement or intervention, stick to it, and avoid “mission creep.” Lesson three: know the country, its government, and, crucially, its people and their culture as well as the enemy. Lesson four: have and maintain resolve and support for military action, particularly by honest reporting, in both countries.
The U.S. failed in both wars because it did not learn these lessons. Consider lesson one in Vietnam. Although it was not party to the 1954 Geneva Conference, the U.S. announced support of its agreement: end of French occupation, partition of Vietnam along the 17th parallel, and scheduled national elections in 1956 to unify the country. But the U.S. soon abandoned its principle of self-determination after it replaced France as Vietnam’s occupier and supported Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, who refused to hold the scheduled elections because he knew that communist Ho Chi Minh would easily defeat him.
The U.S. also did not learn lessons two, three, and four. Fear of a communist regime as the first domino to fall in Southeast Asia was a fear without foundation. Knowledge of Vietnam was skimpy and scattered; worse, leaders ignored OSS/CIA findings that Ho Chi Minh was more nationalist than communist; perceived parallels between the American war for independence and Vietnamese efforts to achieve independence from foreign occupiers, until 1946, the French and the Japanese; and expected these parallels to win American support against French colonial re-occupation. And, from the escalation of hostilities after the Tonkin Gulf fabrication, lying became the modus operandi of the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments, to each other and to their peoples. Gradually, support, never strong, weakened with Buddhist monk immolations and eroded with distrust in the White House and Pentagon leading to growing anti-war demonstrations.
Afghanistan differs in only one respect. By eliminating the draft—the white middle class preferred to let others (minorities, the poor, and the hyper-patriotic) fight wars—American presidents did not need much popular support to make a plaything of a small professional military. They needed only a supposedly legitimate reason (WMD in Iraq) to commit troops to military actions which then evolved into chaos—the only progress made in 20 years’ fighting in Afghanistan. By the way, this 20-year effort gives the lie to those who think the U.S. would have won in Vietnam if it had kept on fighting.
Americans were justifiably outraged by the al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers and the loss of some 3000 civilian lives. Retaliation was a political and military necessity. However, the desire to destroy al-Qaeda training camps, kill its terrorists, and capture or kill bin Laden did not justify enlarging these focused efforts into an anti-Taliban war. In little time and with little thought, the U.S. redefined its mission and redirected its efforts to do what no one imagined doing at the outset. Without having an exit strategy to go with an entry strategy, without a view of the entire undertaking, the U.S. built failure into its unfocused mission, misguided at the beginning, mismanaged in the middle, and muddled at the end. But, then, thinking ahead is not taught at the military academies.
Dislike how they came to power and used it, the U.S. should have accepted that the Taliban represented the collective determination of Afghans whether out of affection, indifference, fear, or impotence to defeat it and develop some other centralized government, if they wanted a centralized government. But no one in any kind of mind at all—never mind a “right mind”—would think that Afghans were just longing for a white, Christian, capitalistic, democratic nation to invade, occupy, and overthrow their way of life. “We always wanted to liberate women and send girls to school, and the good Americans have arrived to make us do what we have always wanted to do”—not. Put like this, it is clear that the U.S. acts like “ugly Americans”: hubristic, arrogant, ignorant, imperious, domineering—generally lacking in human empathy and cultural sensitivity—and, thus, naïve, gullible, easily duped and swindled, and scorned and mocked.
In retrospect, Americans should be ashamed of their country’s involvement in these two needless wars and its implication in thousands and thousands of needless deaths, damaged minds and bodies, and destroyed property. Those who served—flag officers excepted—deserve credit for doing what they may (or may not) have believed was in the service of their country. But their country did not serve them or anyone else other than war-mongering politicians and war-making profiteers.
In prospect, Americans need to resist the traditionally easy recourse to hostilities as a solution to problems mostly impossible to solve by military means. Military response times may be short, but military responses over larger battlefields and over longer times should be planned carefully, both for getting in and getting out, and not self-defeating in the effort. The best revenge is served, not hot and impulsive, but cold and calculated.
A note on fighting insurgencies, if they must be fought to serve a national interest. First, the U.S. should support only those governments which have considerable popular support and a collective will at least as great as America’s to fight insurgents. Second, it must understand and commit to what it takes to defeat an insurgency—no temporary or trivial undertaking. An insurgency depends on two things: mobility and camouflage. Its small forces must be able to move to strike targets suddenly and withdraw quickly. Its troops must be able to blend into the populations to be, say, farmers by day, fighters by night. Counter-insurgency tactics which will not work are grandiose sweeps and thrusts, special forces raids, and overwhelming, but often indiscriminate, firepower from the air, with troops returning to the comfort of bases with PXs, bars, hot meals, hot baths, and clean sheets. The only workable tactics are long-term troop occupation and control throughout the country, with troop units assigned to and supplied in specific areas of responsibility. They manage all movement within the area and round the clock, get to know the people, and, if the people want and define it, provide economic or educational assistance. But these tactics can work only if the U.S. strategy honors the four lessons reflecting American principles.
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