Bitter Vietnam lessons lost in Afghanistan
Simon Jenkins
June 28, 2009
COMMENT


IF GOOD intentions ever paved a road to hell, they are doing so in Afghanistan. History rarely declares when folly turns to disaster, but it does so now. US President Barack Obama and Britain's Gordon Brown are uncannily repeating the route taken by American leaders in Vietnam from 1963 to 1975.

Vietnam began with President Kennedy's 1963 intervention to keep the communist menace at bay and make the world safe for democracy. That is what George Bush and Tony Blair said of terrorism and Afghanistan. By 1965, despite Congress scepticism, American advisers, then planes, then ground forces were deployed. Allies were begged to join but few agreed.

The presence of Americans on Asian soil turned a local insurgency into a regional crusade. The hard-pressed Americans resorted to ever more extensive bombing, deep inside neighbouring countries, despite evidence it was ineffective and counterproductive.

No amount of superior firepower could quell a peasant army that came and went by night and could terrorise or merge into the population. Tales of American atrocities rolled in. The army counted success in enemy dead. A desperate attempt to "train and equip" a new Vietnamese army made it as corrupt as it was unreliable. Billions of dollars were wasted.

Every one of these steps is being re-enacted in Afghanistan. Every sane observer, even serving generals and diplomats, admits that "we are not winning" and show no sign of doing so.

Generals are entitled to plead for more resources and yet claim victory is just round the corner, even when they know it is not. They must lead men into battle. A heavier guilt lies with liberal apologists for this war who continue to invent excuses for its failure and offer glib preconditions for victory.

A classic is an editorial in last Monday's New York Times, congratulating Barack Obama on "sending more troops to the fight" but claiming that there were still not enough.

Strategy, declared the sages of Manhattan, should be "to confront the Taliban head on", as if this had not been tried before. Afghanistan needed "a functioning army and national police that can hold back the insurgents". The way to achieve victory was for the Pentagon, already spending a stupefying $US60 billion ($A74.5 billion) in Afghanistan, to spend a further $US20 billion, increasing the size of the Afghan army from 90,000 to 250,000. This was because ordinary Afghans "must begin to trust their own government".

These lines might have been written in 1972 by General Westmoreland in his Saigon bunker. The New York Times has clearly never seen the Afghan army, or police, in action. Eight years of training costing $US15 billion have been near useless, when men simply decline to fight except to defend their homes. Since the Pentagon originally armed and trained the Taliban to fight the Soviets, this must be the first war where it has trained both sides.

Neither the Pentagon nor the British Ministry of Defence will win Afghanistan through firepower. The strategy of "hearts and minds plus" cannot be realistic, turning Afghanistan into a vast and indefinite barracks with hundreds of thousands of western soldiers sitting atop a colonial Babel of administrators and professionals. It will never be secure. It offers Afghanistan a promise only of relentless war, one that Afghans outside Kabul know that warlords, drug cartels and Taliban sympathisers are winning.

The 2001 policy of invading, capturing Osama bin Laden and ridding the region of terrorist bases has been tested to destruction and failed. Strategy is reduced to the slaughter of hundreds of western soldiers and thousands of Afghans. Troops are being sent out because governments lack the guts to admit that the bid to quell the Islamist menace by force of arms was crazy.

Vietnam destroyed two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, and destroyed the global confidence of a generation of young Americans. Afghanistan — obscenely dubbed the "good war" — could do the same. There will soon be 68,000 American troops in that country.

This is set to be a war of awful proportions, cockpit for the feared clash of civilisations. Each new foreign battalion taps more cash for the Taliban from the Gulf. Each new massacre from the air recruits more youths from the madrasas. Obama is trapped by past mistakes, as were Kennedy and Johnson, cheered by an offstage chorus crying "not enough" and "just one more surge". He has to find a way to disengage from Afghanistan. It is hard to imagine a greater tragedy than for the most exciting US president in a generation to be led by a senseless intervention into a repeat of America's greatest postwar debacle.