No More Vietnams?

[I took this photo at the annual "Mummer's Parade," Middletown, DE, Jan. 1, 2002]

George Will's column in today's Washington Post is a must-read.  Will makes a cogent case for why our Afghan war cannot end well.  He points out that the principal excuses for waging this war--to defeat Al Qaeda and to stabilize the Afghan government--are invalid.  Al Qaeda is not concentrated in Afghanistan, and it would take decades to establish an Afghan government that could keep Muslim extremists out of the country.  Then there is the problem of our announced intention to begin withdrawing in 2011.  Obama, ironically, is pursuing the same surge strategy in Afghanistan that Bush pursued in Iraq.  But here is the paragraph that really caught my attention:


The president's party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn-down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans' patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan's limitless demands for it. This will not end well.


I was happy to see such a prominent commentator acknowledge the toll this latest surge is going to take on our troops.   
     Just the other day, I head someone suggest that "this," after all, is what the troops volunteered for.  Not quite.  We don't have "volunteers" in the sense that the French Foreign Legion of old had "volunteers."  Our young "warriors" didn't enlist in search of a good war or, failing that, whatever war we've got.  Most carry a set of decidedly mixed motives, and even family ties, in their Alice Packs.  Their new service anthem should perhaps be Credence Clearwater's "Fortunate Son," which poses and answers the following musical question, Whenever I ask how much should we give,/The only answer is more, more, more!" 
      Obama, of course, insists that Afghanistan will not be another Vietnam.  We'll see.  But even neo-cons Michael Medved and Michael Savage seem to be worried about the parallels.  At the same time, some dismiss the comparison, pointing out that the number and rate of casualties in Afghanistan pale in comparison to Vietnam.  My answer:  Give them time.  We may get there yet.
      And if we do, I'd like to suggest an appropriate memorial.  We could just build another V-shaped wall parallel to the existing Vietnam Memorial.  Viewed from above, it would resemble a corporal's chevron, visually driving home the parallels between the two wars.  --EFP 

"It's Deja Vu All Over Again"!

I very much fear that historians will someday look back on President Obama as the LBJ of this era. 

      President Johnson, I have come to realize, really was intent on creating a kinder, gentler America with his “Great Society” social programs.  But thanks to that “bitch of a war,” as he was wont to call it, Johnson found himself caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.  If he had begun to disengage from Vietnam, his political enemies would have branded him soft on Communism.  If he had fully mobilized the reserves and the National Guard, his political enemies would have used that as an excuse to reject Johnson’s social programs.  They would have argued that we can’t afford both guns and butter. 

     Now, over 40 years later, Obama is falling into the same trap.  I believe that he would genuinely like his legacy to be an America in which adequate health care is guaranteed.  But Obama’s political opponents are already complaining that his proposed health care reforms would greatly increase an already huge deficit created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as his government bailouts and stimulus programs.   Had he opted to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, however, the pushback would have been ugly.  Cheney and his ilk would have attacked Obama--again--or leaving America vulnerable. 

     Moreover, I worry that, like Johnson before him, Obama doesn’t really understand the war he is waging.  As George Will and others have reminded us, we’re not at war with a nation state.  We’re at war with a freelance group of ideologues who don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan.  The fact that the 9/11 group trained and plotted in Afghanistan is irrelevant.  They can just as easily train and plot in Somalia and a number of other countries. 

     This is not to say that we shouldn’t go after the Al Qaeda still in Afghanistan, but I believe that George Will and General Krulak are right in recommending that we limit our efforts to small, elite killer teams and predator drones.  A large-scale commitment only plays into the enemy’s hands.  The so-called collateral damage we’ll inevitably inflict will help al Qaeda recruit, as will the appearance that we are indeed mounting a crusade against Islam. 

     Of course, in all fairness, Obama claims our main objective is to build up and train the Afghan forces to take over.  This too was tried in LBJ’s day; it was called “Vietnamization.”  So are we now pursuing a course of “Afghnistanization”?   Awkward terms aside, I haven’t heard that Afghan troops are any more into it than the Army of the late Republic of Vietnam was.  Even more troubling, I have heard that a sense of nationalism or national loyalty is alien to most Afghans. 

     So “the more things change . . . .”

--EFP

P.S.  Where are the additional 30,000 troops going to come from?  But that’s another topic.

George Will, and EFP, on Afghanistan

George Will’s recent column on Afghanistan is not to be missed. He makes a cogent case for pulling back from Afghanistan. We are once again trying to prop up an unpopular regime against an ideologically committed group of nationalists, and we’ll never have “world enough and time” (my allusion, not Will's) to succeed. Just as with the Viet Cong of old, the Taliban simply wait us out and return to the villages and towns our troops have supposedly cleared. We’re doomed to fail, Will suggests, because we’ll never be able to field enough troops to “clear and hold,” much less engage in nation-building—the main tenets of counter-insurgency doctrine. Will reminds us that our initial objective in going in to Afghanistan was to kick out al-Qaida, and that objective has been met. Will argues that our main concern should be Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

     I’ve been thinking of late about the essential irony of our current war in Afghanistan. Does anyone else recall that we trained, equipped, and encouraged the Taliban in their struggle against Soviet occupation? Once again, in our Cold-War determination to contain and embarrass the Soviet Union we paid scant attention to the culture and history of the people we were supporting, nor did we give much thought to the long-range implications of their success. As Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner) reminds us in his historic novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, the Soviets insisted on equal opportunity for women. The Taliban put women in burqas and would not allow them to go to school.

--Edward F. Palm