http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39808.html
By KAI BIRD
7/15/10
The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old. Despite the Obama
administration's July 2011 target date for de-escalating, there seems
no end in sight.
It is already longer than the U.S. ground war in Vietnam from 1965 to
1973. To be sure, the circumstances are vastly different. Yet, there
are numerous and disturbing parallels between Afghanistan and the
messy, politically intractable scenarios of Vietnam.
Afghanization. Vietnamization. Surge. Gradual escalation. Corrupt
dictators. Internal dissension. The war follows a familiar script.
President Barack Obama has called Afghanistan a "war of necessity."
President Lyndon B. Johnson felt the same about Vietnam a "tar
baby" war he was reluctant to wage but felt compelled to escalate. So
what is the difference between LBJ's strategy of "gradual escalation"
and Obama's own reluctant, highly calibrated "surge"?
In Vietnam, U.S. soldiers bore the brunt of the fighting for years,
while Washington waited for Saigon to "Vietnamize" the war. So what
is the difference between "Vietnamization" and Obama's hope that
"Afghanization" will allow U.S. troops to scale down within a year?
Until his recent dismissal, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was touted as a
master of the U.S. Army's "new" counterinsurgency strategy. We are
often reminded that his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, wrote the
manual on COIN as if these tactics are wholly original.
Have we forgotten the efforts of counterinsurgency generals like
Edward Lansdale to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese?
Lansdale, one basis for Graham Greene's "quite American," pioneered
"black operations" and psychological warfare tactics against both the
Filipino communist Huks guerrillas and the Viet Minh guerrillas of
the 1950s. He was the McChrystal of his era.
Meanwhile, McChrystal's recent failed efforts to secure Marja in the
Taliban-infested region of Helmand province is strangely reminiscent
of Gen. William Westmoreland's "strategic hamlet" program which
also failed miserably to win any hearts and minds.
Similarly, McChrystal's extensive use of unmanned drones for targeted
killings of Taliban leaders and cadres echoes the CIA's notorious
Phoenix program, in which thousands of Vietnamese were singled out
for assassination. This, too, did nothing to win hearts and minds.
But perhaps most disturbing are the parallels between the weak,
politically unrepresentative regimes of President Hamid Karzai and
South Vietnam's then-President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Karzai is a Pushtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group. But Tajiks
from the Northern Alliance, the guerrilla group that fought against
the Taliban regime, dominate his administration.
Diem was an ardent Catholic, a distinct minority in Buddhist Vietnam.
Both Karzai and Diem were selected by their U.S. sponsors to become
president. Karzai actually won a presidential election in 2004, with
54 percent of the vote. But most observers agree he manipulated the
2009 election results. Diem, on the other hand, never won a real
election. He refused to hold a referendum on unifying the country in
1956 because he thought he'd lose to Ho Chi Minh.
Karzai's half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is said to be a political
powerhouse and extremely corrupt a description that neatly fit
Diem's own brother, the opium-smoking Ngo Dinh Nhu. In recent months,
Karzai and his brother have been engaged in gray-area, backdoor
negotiations with Taliban representatives to explore whether some
elements of the Taliban might be brought into the Karzai administration.
Diem and his brother Nhu engaged in similar secret talks with the
Viet Cong in 1963. This so alarmed the Kennedy administration that
the CIA was ordered to feel out the South Vietnamese army about
launching a coup against the brothers.
The coup occurred in November 1963, and both Diem and Nhu were assassinated.
Things went downhill in South Vietnam after that.
We may now be at a similar stage in Afghanistan: Witness the
jockeying and backbiting within the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and within
Obama's national security team in Washington.
McChrystal was reportedly one of the few Americans in Kabul who had a
tolerable working relationship with Karzai. Earlier this year, a
leaked cable had U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry reporting that
Karzai "is not an adequate partner" and "continues to shun
responsibility for any sovereign burden."
This sounds much like Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador in
Saigon in 1963, urging President John F. Kennedy to get rid of Diem.
Yet another clear parallel: U.S. diplomats, in the Vietnam era and
now, have vigorously dissented from what they saw as misguided tactics.
During the Vietnam War, there was a legion of official dissents from
men like James Thompson Jr., an aide to National Security Adviser
McGeorge Bundy, and a host of junior Foreign Service officers who
filed official dissenting cables from Saigon. One such junior officer
was Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and
Pakistan and known to be critical of Karzai.
Similarly, recall that Peter Galbraith, the former United Nations
deputy representative to Kabul, was recently forced out when he
protested Karzai's election manipulation. Peter is the son of the
former U.S. ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith who was
himself a vigorous dissenter against the Kennedy-era Vietnam policy.
And then there is Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. Marine and a senior
civilian representative in Zabul province, who resigned in protest
last autumn. "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the
strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," Hoh said.
After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, foreign policy
neoconservatives bemoaned the fact that the "Vietnam syndrome" might
make it politically implausible for future presidents to send U.S.
troops abroad. Liberals hoped this lesson, against what the Founding
Fathers labeled "foreign entanglements," would be remembered.
But with the end of the Cold War, a new triumphalism persuaded many
Americans to forget about the Vietnam debacle. America had "won" the
Cold War and now stood alone and unchallenged. After Sept. 11, this
gave way to the grim notion that there are "wars of necessity."
Maybe so. But maybe not in Afghanistan.
If the war has become a quagmire like Vietnam, then the Afghans
should be fighting it. Not our young men and women.
--
Kai Bird is author of "The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William
Bundy, Brothers in Arms." He and Martin J. Sherwin won the Pulitzer
Prize for distinguished biography for their book "American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer."
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