Another Pointless, Unwinnable War: Lessons From the Vietnam War Applied to Afghanistan

A couple of weeks ago, I talked with my nine and a half year old daughter about why we bother learning about history. She argued that it’s boring and it’s past. I non-eloquently said that history is interesting and that we can learn a lot from studying it. As would be expected, the conversation drifted off to something else. I remembered this conversation as I read Jonathan Schell’s “The Fifty-Year War” (The Nation 11/11/2009), which relates the lessons of  the Vietnam War to the war in Afghanistan. With a clenched stomach, I realized that we are being led into meaningless war after war by people who have a fourth-grader’s attitude toward the value of history lessons. The difference being that the grown-ups are responsible for sending soldiers off to kill and be killed, causing civilian casualties, fostering hate against us, and, of course, spending billions and trillions of our dollars. As I see it, the only beneficiaries of this endeavor are the military industry and the various firms who snag the lucrative war-support contracts.

Starting with his introduction, here are some of my favorite sections from Schell’s article,

I was about to write that there can be no military solution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. But I almost fainted with boredom and had to stop. Who, as President Obama lengthily ponders his decisions regarding the war, wants to repeat a point that’s been made 11,000 times before? Is there anyone on earth who doesn’t know by now that you can’t win a guerrilla war without winning the “hearts and minds” of the people? The American public has known this since the American defeat in Vietnam. The formerly colonized peoples of the Third World, whose hearts and minds were the ones contested, know it. American officialdom knows it. […] Today, even the general in charge in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, now asking for 40,000 or more troops, knows it. He can read all about it in the new Army counterinsurgency manual produced by his boss, Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus. There he can learn that “political factors have primacy in COIN [counterinsurgency]” and that “arguably, the decisive battle is for the people’s minds.”

But if one has repeated this point anyway (as I have, by a backdoor route), then one must go on to make the rather newer point that there is no political solution that serves the foreign invader either. The problem is structural and fundamental. Like the imperial powers of the past, the United States wants to impose its will on other countries. Yet it is different from those previous powers in at least one respect: it does not aim to rule the countries it invades indefinitely. Conscious that the American public will not support war without end, it means to leave one day. Therefore the art of victory has to be to try to set up a government that can both survive US withdrawal and serve US interests. The circle to be squared is getting the people of a whole country to want what Washington wants. The trouble is that, left to their own devices, other peoples are likely to want what they want, not what we want.

One problem flowing from this dilemma is that the more the United States does to set up such a government, the more the “Afghans themselves” (or the Vietnamese themselves or the Iraqis themselves or the whoevers themselves) are tainted by the association. If the paradox of military engagement in such a conflict is that the more you fight the more you lose, then the paradox of political engagement is that the more you rule the weaker the native component of the government becomes, and the more likely it is to collapse when you leave, as the South Vietnamese government did in 1975. […]

And so, hanging over the scene, still, are the political pressures that go back almost fifty years, to Vietnam, or even sixty years, to the myth that the United States lost China. There is an unmistakable continuity that runs from McCarthy’s attacks on Truman and his administration for “appeasement” and even “treason” clear down to Dick Cheney’s and Karl Rove’s and Glenn Beck’s refrains assailing Obama for opposing the Iraq War, not to speak of Sarah Palin’s charge during the election that he had been “palling around with terrorists.” (The Republicans even call Obama a “socialist,” as if the cold war had never ended.) [..]  it is no secret that Obama’s support for the war in Afghanistan served as protection against charges of weakness over his policy of withdrawing from Iraq. […] In the words of foreign policy old hand Morton Abramowitz to Packer, “Obama…to show he was tough, made Afghanistan his signature issue because he wanted to get out of Iraq.” In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? […]