http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6894480.ece
As the President ponders sending more troops to Afghanistan, he is
haunted by the conflict that scarred the US psyche
October 29, 2009
Ben Macintyre
An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack
Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan:
it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America's enduring historical hang-up.
Comparisons between these two conflicts are easy to make, but hard to
avoid: a grinding, unpredictable battle in difficult terrain, a weak
and corrupted foreign government kept afloat by American guns and
money; a versatile enemy, adept at ambush warfare, with sanctuary in
a neighbouring country.
American public opinion on Afghanistan is shifting in a way
reminiscent of the tide of feeling that brought the Vietnam War to
its humiliating close. The death toll is ramping up, with 55 US
servicemen killed this month the war is suddenly being brought home
to America, in bodybags.
The first senior official has resigned in protest over a war that may
be unwinnable. "I fail to see the value in the continued US
casualties or expenditures . . . in what is, truly, a civil war,"
declared Matthew Hoh, the decorated former Marine who resigned from
the US Foreign Service this week. He might have been speaking in 1969.
The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor
practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not
backward-looking by nature, but the trauma of Vietnam is seared on
the national memory like no other event in US history.
The debate is suffused with the language of the Vietnam War: "hawks",
"doves" and fear of the "quagmire". Mr Obama is of the post-Vietnam
generation, yet he, too, is haunted by it. Last month he declared:
"You never step into the same river twice, and so, Afghanistan is not
Vietnam. But the danger of overreach and not having clear goals and
not having strong support from the American people, those are all
issues that I think about all the time."
Those words perfectly capture the anxiety that is fraying nerves in
the White House, a determination to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam,
but an inability to see the conflict though any other prism. After
the Gulf War, the first President Bush declared triumphantly, and
quite wrongly, that America had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all".
The hawks are quick to point out that the Vietnam analogy is
routinely trotted out whenever America goes to war. Over the past 25
years it has been invoked in response to US military action in
Lebanon, El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Iraq (twice).
In terms of scale, Afghanistan is still a far cry from Vietnam, which
involved more than half a million US troops and claimed 58,000
American lives. Fewer than 1,000 American troops have died in
Afghanistan in eight years. In the earlier conflict, America was
facing not only the Vietcong, but the highly trained North Vietnamese
Army, supported by the Soviet Union and China.
When President Johnson intensified the war in Vietnam he, too, was
impelled by a determination not to repeat the past, but in this case
the precedent was appeasement and the lessons of Munich.
Which lessons may be drawn from the Vietnam War depend on which
historians are doing the looking and which part of that long and
bitter conflict they are looking at.
Two history books on the Vietnam War are at present slugging it out
on Washington bedside tables. Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster
argues that Lyndon Johnson was pressed by the military into
escalating an unwinnable conflict, while Lewis Sorley, in A Better
War, suggests that antiwar feeling and pressure from Congress forced
Richard Nixon to reject a counter-insurgency strategy that could have
succeeded.
Vietnam is instructive not because it offers some neat lesson in how
to win or end the war in Afghanistan, but because the American public
are increasingly convinced that the latter conflict is heir to the former.
The polls are extraordinarily revealing. Some 63 per cent of
Americans do not think Mr Obama has a clear plan for the war. A
similar proportion oppose sending more troops. As Country Joe
McDonald put it in 1965: "And it's one, two, three . . . What are we
fighting for?" The most revealing statistic of all suggests that a
narrow majority of Americans now believe that Afghanistan is turning
into "another Vietnam".
The military and strategic situation in Afghanistan has not reached
the critical impasse of Vietnam, but a psychological and political
turning point has been reached, based on a collective, if often
simplistic, memory of the Vietnam War.
The antiwar protests in the US are still small, but opposition to the
Vietnam conflict also started piecemeal. For every official who
resigns on principle, such as Mr Hoh, how many more, as in the
Vietnam era, nurse their creeping doubts in silence? Now, as then,
the fear is growing that American lives are being lost at an
accelerating rate, for reasons that are increasingly obscure to many
Americans, in defence of a dubious regime. News that the CIA has been
bankrolling the Afghan President's drug baron brother has compounded
the sense of déjà vu.
Allied to this is concern that Mr Obama's hopeful promises of change
are being swept away by the cost of the war ($250,000 a soldier a
year), in the same way that Johnson's domestic agenda was hampered by
"that bitch of a war" in Vietnam.
Mr Obama may authorise the deployment of more troops to Afghanistan;
the war may yet be won by military means; fears of an Afghan quagmire
may prove unfounded.
But as he ponders whether to hurl more slings and arrows into that
fight, Mr Obama is facing a conflict on another front, nearer to
home, harder to pin down than the Taleban, and just as dangerous to
his Administration the growing perception that history is repeating
itself. Fighting the ghosts of Vietnam has become an urgent military
priority. If he loses that battle, he will have lost the war.
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