We've seen diaries and read comments about the parallels between the war in Afghanistan and our war in Viet Nam. Analysts and journalists have written about it. There are many similarities and there are also significant differences. Now, after years of US and NATO involvement, few in our media bother to discuss this topic.
Taking exception to this current lack of comparison is one very detailed, well researched and written article. It appeared in Military Review, the November-December 2009 issue. It is authored by Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason. The title of their article is Refighting the Last War - Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template.
For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing.
For some of us who participated in the earlier fiasco this sense of deja-vu is very troublesome. Thus this diary.
There are many parallel issues worthy of discussion. Two stand out because of their importance and because of the fact they are rarely considered or discussed. The first of these is the issue of legitimacy, that is the legitimacy (not to be confused with popularity) of the government of Afghanistan in the eyes of the people of Afghanistan.
"Legitimacy" is a word that is being bandied about a lot recently in Washington. After eight years, pundits, talking heads, and government officials alike have suddenly discovered the "legitimacy of governance issue." Unfortunately, none of them seems to understand the real one. The issue is not the moral meltdown of President Hamid Karzai over the last six months, nor his presiding over an absurdly (and unnecessarily) rigged election, nor that he is seen as illegitimate afterward by the majority of Afghans. The real issue is that President Karzai was seen as illegitimate before the election.
The authors' study contends that historically in Afghanistan a regime is viewed as being legitimate according to the degree it stayed out of the daily lives of the people and that historical factors which demonstrate legitimacy are those of tribal patriarchy and religion. There is no precedent in the eyes of the people for legitimacy in a "legal" sense - as pointed out in the article "western style elections and the rule of law". For the rural Pashtuns this dynastic and religious authority "has been unquestioned for over a thousand years".
Both Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Viet Nam came to power in a pattern common to US alliances with dictators throughout the Third World then and now and kept in power, or at least backed by, a US military presence and military aid. President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who had been living in the US for the previous nine years, was selected (upon recommendation of the CIA) to become the first president.
He won a rigged election with 98% of the vote, and received more than 600,000 votes in the capital Saigon where only about 450,000 people were registered to vote. Anyone interested in reading this diary should be familiar with Afghanistan's rigged elections last year.
One of the major problems faced by the Americans in South Viet Nam was the politically illegitimate and corrupt client regimes which held power in Saigon. The situation is much the same in Kabul, a "corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside of the capital city".
How long would Ngo Dinh Diem or any of his successors have remained in power without the backing of the US military? How long would Hamid Karzai remain in power?
For more on legitimacy, this recent report on Kandahar Province - March 2010 concludes:
...findings indicate endemic corruption, along with a lack of security and basic services, in Kandahar Province. Collectively, this sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.
This is also noteworthy (from the same report)
Reconciliation is a popular concept in Kandahar province. There is almost universal agreement that negotiation with the Taliban is preferable to continued fighting. Specific approaches such as calling a Loya Jirga and a jobs training program for former fighters are both widely supported. The desire for reconciliation is likely driven by the perception that the Taliban are part of Afghan society; a significant majority of respondents view the Taliban as "Our Afghan brothers".
At a recent meeting in Kandahar with tribal leaders and village elders regarding the planned upcoming operation there, President Karzai was
... overwhelmed by a barrage of complaints about corruption and misrule. As he was heckled at a shura of 1,500 tribal leaders and elders, he appeared to offer them a veto over military action. "Are you happy or unhappy for the operation to be carried out?" he asked.
The elders shouted back: "We are not happy."
General Stanley McChrystal was in attendance and was reported to have appeared "apprehensive".
Times Online
At least a meeting took place. In Viet Nam the military would have just gone ahead with what they had planned and locals would have to fend for themselves as best they could.
With respect to legitimacy, the authors warn:
This is the first of the two deeply profound replications of the Vietnam War in Afghanistan, and one which the US military should consider carefully before putting its full weight behind further escalation.
The second issue I would like to bring to readers' attention is the very nature of the war we are fighting with the focus on who the enemy is and understanding what motivates him to keep fighting.
Looking back at Viet Nam:
an intense and pervasive narrative of nationalism and reunification motivated the enemy, but the United States obtusely insisted on casting the war as a fight against the spread of communism. However, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) were not fighting for communism. They were fighting for Vietnam. We were fighting against communism, but the enemy wasn’t fighting for it.
And in Afghanistan:
Similarly, in Afghanistan, the enemy has created a pervasive national discourse, in this case of religious jihad. Senior U.S. and NATO officials, however, continue to misread the fundamental narrative of the enemy they are fighting, determined in this case to wage a secular campaign against an enemy who is fighting a religious war. The motivations of many individual foot soldiers are baser, of course, ranging from revenge to criminal to simply mercenary, but that is irrelevant.
The authors point out that most all of the Taliban leaders, through their entire chain of command, are mullahs. And that while we are fighting a counterinsurgency the enemy is fighting a jihad on their home turf.
... the intersection of how insurgencies end and how jihads end is historically nil, and talk of "negotiating with the Taliban" to find a political solution, as if the Taliban were some sort of unified secular political organization, is profoundly naive.
As the Afghans see it one cannot negotiate with God’s divine will. They also view negotiations as something to be sought after when one is losing in order to get better surrender terms.
In Viet Nam our strategy was that of attrition. In Afghanistan our strategy is based on implied attrition through "clearing operations" and "compound searches". In Viet Nam the term was "search and destroy".
In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, the enemy’s manpower pool for troops and tactical leaders is not his Achilles heel, because, as in Vietnam, the enemy can replace casualties at a far higher rate than we can ever inflict them. For eight years in Afghanistan we have fought exactly the way the enemy expected and hoped we would. The Taliban have read Vietnam history, too. (In both wars the Army has badly underestimated the enemy’s intelligence, another tragic parallel.)
We celebrate the killing some Taliban leader or "militants" in a drone attack. We capture others. Replacing them is not difficult. "Collateral damage" - "so what" some will argue "this is war and these kinds of things happen in war".
In a revenge-based culture, we’re still kicking in doors, violating Pashtun honor codes by searching compounds and women, and blowing up civilians just as we have been since 2002. To paraphrase John Paul Vann, we haven’t been in Afghanistan for eight years, we’ve been in Afghanistan for one year eight times. The Army’s embedded DNA code to "find, fix, and finish the enemy," the article of faith was, if anything, reinforced by the Vietnam experience. As in Vietnam, the U.S. Army in Afghanistan is still subconsciously determined to fight the kind of war of maneuver it likes to fight, rather than adapt its tactics to the kind of war it is actually in.
In Viet Nam the army had little interest in counterinsurgency. The Marine Corps had a small program which Gen. Westmoreland, as per Colonel William Corson, "damned with faint praise". We hear much about COIN and "counterinsurgency" these days but there is little news coming out of Afghanistan to show for it. As the article states - "Big Army talks the talk of counterinsurgency but still walks the walk of attrition."
Last year, for example, an Army Special Forces officer returning from a year of duty in southern Afghanistan told us that although he had pacified his district by building a relationship of trust with the elders, and had the lowest number of IED attacks and ambushes in his province for the past six months, he was rated the lowest of all the officers in his unit for promotion because he had the fewest number of "kills" during his tour of duty.
Such is counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
The article concludes that "time is running out" and that NATO might soon peel away and in the time remaining, perhaps the duration of this presidential administration. They also believe that if things were done differently, if we really had a counterinsurgency program that had begun with protecting the people rather then conducting search and destroy missions, that the outcome would not necessarily be doomed to failure.
And with respect to legitimacy:
A ceremonial monarchy would have provided the necessary traditional legitimacy for an elected government in Kabul, but since the Afghan monarchy was eliminated by the U.S. and the U.N. against the express wishes of more than three-quarters of the delegates at the Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002 the United States must now embrace the only remaining secular alternative to the religious legitimacy of the Taliban—the traditional legitimacy of local tribal leadership.
The tribal structure is wounded, but not yet fatally. The rural villages are still full of 50- to 60-year-old men who sat in the jirgas and salah-mashwarahs thirty years ago as 20- to 30-year-old men, and they know how it’s supposed to work. Indeed, they want it to work, but they need security to make it happen.
As the system gradually comes back into balance, the radical mullahs will return to their rightful places as the religious advisers and spiritual guides for their communities, rather than remain the radical leaders they are now. This is how jihads on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier end. We have to understand the enemy before we can defeat him.
The article does not attempt to explain what our aims are in Afghanistan. As we continue to build huge military bases the transparency as to what our goals are has not been forthcoming. The US officially insists that it is not setting up permanent bases in Afghanistan but the scale and permanency of the construction underway at Bagram seems to suggest, at the least, a very long stay.
Stanley Karnow commenting in an interview with the Associated Press said "It now seems unthinkable that the US could lose [in Afghanistan], but that’s what experts... thought in Vietnam in 1967. When asked what lessons could be drawn from the Vietnam experience, Karnow responded "What did we learn from Vietnam? We learned that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I".
And not I.