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Afghanistan will prove to be Obama’s Vietnam
The President is committing the US to intervention in Afghanistan that recalls JFK’s attempts to expel communism from Vietnam
The world falls in love with a charismatic young president, his stylish wife, and their charming young children. In the campaign for the presidency he has defeated his Republican opponent in part by charging Republican failure in the war against America's enemies.
In the dawn of his administration this Harvard man musters strategic buttress from America's best and brightest for a decisive escalation by which the foe will be routed. Counter-insurgency will go hand in hand with nation-building. Corruption will be banished and local troops trained to shoulder the burden of the war.
To be sure, there are differences between Jack Kennedy's America in 1961 and Barack Obama's in 2009. At the start of the Sixties the US economy hadn’t crested. It was still on the way up. The mantra was "guns and butter". In 1961 think-tank intellectuals, defeating Vietnamese guerillas in their Top Secret memos to Kennedy and his commanders, invoked Britain's defeat of the Communist insurgency in Malaya, America's victory over the Huks in the Philippines.
An excited vibrancy coloured Obama’s rhetoric when he vowed to kill bin Laden
In 2009, veterans' hospitals here offer bleak testimony that 150,000 US troops, lavishly equipped with advanced weaponry, were held down for years in Iraq by the guerillas' rudimentary kerbside explosives.
Woe betide a president who believes his own stump speeches. In his campaign Obama outflanked charges from McCain that he was a peacenik and a wimp by declaring week after week that Iraq was the wrong battlefield, that the enemy was al-Qaeda and their sanctuary Afghanistan. An excited vibrancy coloured the community organiser's rhetoric as he spoke of his determination to "kill bin Laden".
Most people thought this pledge would get lobbed into the trash can the moment McCain conceded. But no. Last Friday I drove down Interstate 5 through the early spring blossom in Oregon's Willamette Valley, listening to Obama on the radio marching through his schedule for escalation and victory in Afghanistan.
He was born in the year JFK became president, but has this supposedly smart fellow not read a single decent history of the Vietnam war and of America's defeat? Apparently not. Otherwise how could he blithely announce that: "We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan Army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011... Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable." Nothing perishes quicker in war than "clear metrics".
Significantly, Obama did not order a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) as he evolved his plan, doubtless because he and his National Security Adviser feared such an NIE might arrive at the same sort of depressing assessment as the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism, which concluded invasions and occupations do not make America safer but lead instead to an upsurge in terrorism.
It seems, from an inside dopester story by Bill Geertz in the Washington Times, that in the White House sessions formulating Obama's Afghan policy Vice President Joe Biden and deputy Secretary of State James B Steinberg argued for a minimal strategy of stabilising Afghanistan. Against them Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for the region, US Central Command leader General David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton successfully sold Obama on a major nation-building programme, bringing Afghanistan out of feudal poverty and backwardness into the healthful air of a stable and prosperous democracy, respectful of women.
Obama is being pushed into actions similar to those JFK took in VietnamMaybe Biden forgot to point out to his boss that this was the Afghanistan model espoused by the leftist Noor Taraki in the late 1970s, setting off US alarm bells which duly led to Taraki's murder and the CIA's huge covert and successful intervention in support of the drug barons and warlords, whose feudal offspring are now America's actual or prospective allies in the war on the Taliban.
As Obama proudly flourished his alliterative triad ("to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan"), I listened with the same dismayed frisson as I did - more than four decades ago - to Kennedy's similarly childish rhetoric of intervention, whose dark underbelly was the murder of the Diem brothers, and the birth of the Phoenix assassination programme of "Viet Cong infrastructure".
Obama's brisk sentences on March 27 committed thousands more US troops to overwhelm the Taliban, oblivious of the judgment of sensible Afghan veterans that it's precisely the presence of foreign troops that prompts Pashtuns to support the Taliban and join their ranks. More brisk sentences summoned Pakistan to the crusade against terror, as if Pakistan's intelligence establishment does not work hand in glove with the Taliban and protects al-Qaeda leaders.
The march of folly is underway. Bush and Cheney’s 'war on terror' is now married to Clintonian blueprints for nation-building and social engineering, a wedding officiated over by General Petraeus, whose mythical surge in Iraq was hailed last year by Obama as having "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams".
The fantasy of America’s healing kiss flares in Obama's heart just as it did in Kennedy's. It was General Douglas McArthur who told Kennedy in 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." True then, true now. ·
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If you simplify you do more than highlight salient details; you also file away at important facts. Occasionally this is deliberate at others, merely slack handed thinking.
Afghanistan then housed, fed and trained Islamic jihadists from around the world to carry out attacks on the west. Today it just does not. The survivors are hiding in caves or more frequently among civilians in Pakistan. Their capacity to organise is now solely driven by self defence. We are and they are fighting but on their ground.
The links between those that carried out attacks on the west in the latest phase of the 'long war on the west' (1970) and Afghanistan are clear and verified by other sources than American generals or spies. Many 'graduates' of jihadi training are currently in the west and it remains to be seen what this legacy of expertise will be. People died on a London bus because of it. Those of us including myself who lived amongst Pakistani immigrants twenty five years ago can attest to the rise of fundamentalism in UK cities at a time when mentions of Kabul put the learned in mind of a Victorian music hall song if it meant anything at all.
I believe the US won the war in Vietnam and I also believe if she had not fought there then much of south east Asia up to the gates of India, the largest democracy in the world (one not free from the attentions of Afghan trained jihadi's) would have succumbed to communist expansion. The fact that many western progressives understood and welcomed this as much as they seemingly warm to Islamic fundamentalism is another topic altogether. The Vietnam war was woefully mismanaged and replete with great crimes; so were other wars in modern times. De-constructing the Vietnam War is over due. It has however, long since joined other famous historical examples of the genre, whereby false and misleading comparisons are derived from weak or imaginary parallels and produce unintended outcomes: Hitler springs to mind.
No, the shrewd have been saying for some time that it is Pakistan, not Afghanistan which is the problem. The former has at least some tangible cultural heritage of sophistication and urbanity (Kabul was the setting for an exposition of modernism in the 1960s and was for centuries the axle in the Silk Roads). Pakistan simply does not have such a history to rescue it.
References to 'the brightest and the best' and ambitious generals (let us not forget MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bomb in Korea) in the context of a misunderstood conflict forty years ago will not serve to illuminate. Here it is meretricious and misleading.
There is absolutely no way that the two conflicts can be compared.One was secular and the other religious.Afganistan is directly about us,Vietnam was about the USA.Afganistan is about containment of Islamisim,which knows no borders.These Islamists are something akin to the dark ages in Europe.We must never allow facists to dominate the world stage.they must be destroyed.
As usual Britain is rushing to lick yankee shoe-leather - this time in Afghanistan (again). No-one dare admit that the invasion was a hopeless mistake based on Bush's idiocy. And for that, young men must pay with their lives - because Gordon Brown hasn't got a SPINE.
Meantime Foggy Rasmussen (another yankee patsy) has failed to become Head of NATO - not even he was sufficiently bellicose.
Yes, I fear that Alexander Cockburn is right about his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnem. The answer is not easy, but a way has to be found to prevent the USA getting bogged down in yet another war which it cannot possibly win. Try very stringent visa restrictions on people from certain countries in the area, as a start, perhaps? They can only cause great harm if they are actually in the US. Deport those who fit the criteria of becoming potential terrorists. There would be loud cries of human rights etc, but innocent young Americans and others who are being sent to Afghanistan to be slaughtered also deserve to have their human rights recognised. For me, this is the only policy of President Obama's with which I have grave misgivings.
Lets play a guessing game who are alqaida's and the talibans worst enemies, who can the americans go to and ask if they can rent an airbase so they can resupply their people in afghanistan without having to involve the russians or the pakistanis.
answers on a postcard please