I don’t pretend to be an expert analyst. I’m certainly no Jeff Huber. I’m simply a somewhat observant citizen of the USA who has been awake for much of the last 57 years. And what I find unbelievable is how quickly and thoroughly we forget the most obvious lessons of our own history...and as they say, those who forget history are bound to do something better next time.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- America's top commander in Afghanistan warns that more troops are needed there within the next year or the nearly 8-year-old war "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of a 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.
"Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible," U.S. and NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in the document, according to the Post.
U.S. general calls for more troops in Afghanistan
Many have said Afghanistan is not Vietnam. Well yeah, no kiddin’...but the parallels are pretty damned spooky. One thing we should remember from Vietnam is that the advantage goes to the occupied...call it the home team advantage.
"You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it."
Ho Chi Minh
We’ve been in Afghanistan for eight long years. The public appetite for this crap is not inexhaustible.
The third front in Afghanistan: the American public
New York - Recent polls show that a majority of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting. This is said to weigh heavily on President Obama as he considers Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request to focus on counterinsurgency and add 40,000 troops to the field.
Christian Science Monitor
As was the case in Vietnam, if President Obama escalates the war in Afghanistan now he will be going against the will of the American people...and that would be a terrible mistake in my opinion. Not only would it get a lot more people needlessly killed, but also it would not bode well for his presidency. If Lyndon Johnson were still around, he could tell him that.
The beginning of the end of the Vietnam War commenced on January 31st, 1968, the Vietnamese lunar New Year known as Tet. In an audacious move that came to be known as the Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies launched a nationwide series of coordinated attacks across South Vietnam that took the Americans and South Vietnamese government forces by surprise. The American embassy in Saigon was overrun and briefly occupied by Viet Cong sappers and the imperial city of Hue was invaded and occupied by 10,000 North Vietnamese Army regulars and VC. In all over a hundred towns and cities were attacked in what was the largest single military operation of the war.
Though taken completely by surprise, the US and South Vietnamese forces quickly took the upper hand in the vast majority of the attacks. The exception was the battle for Hue, which raged for over a month with heavy casualties on all sides before being retaken by the Americans and South Vietnamese. The NVA and VC suffered massive casualties in virtually every attack and the overall outcome was considered a stunning military defeat for their forces. What was perhaps not immediately apparent is that the NVA/VC had won a major psychological victory, and in that there is a critically important lesson: it is possible to militarily dominate one’s opponent and still lose.
The Tet Offensive created a crisis within the Johnson administration, which became increasingly unable to convince the American public that it had been a major defeat for the communists. The optimistic assessments made prior to the offensive by the administration and the Pentagon came under heavy criticism and ridicule as the "credibility gap" that had opened in 1967 widened into a chasm.
Tet Offensive
In the months leading up to the Tet Offensive, American officials had been reassuring a war-weary public that victory was at hand, that we had ‘the enemy’ on the run and that the war was practically over. The Tet Offensive set that notion on its head. No one had imagined that ‘the enemy’ was capable of any such thing as a massively coordinated, nationwide military offensive. It was now clear that this was no rag-tag guerrilla army on the verge of defeat and that there was still plenty of fight left in our Vietnamese opponents. Americans on the other hand were damned tired of taking casualties for no good reason that anyone could understand, and were absolutely floored that an enemy that they’d been promised were all but beaten could rise as one with such determination and ferocity. What was already a profoundly controversial and unpopular war became a stinking albatross around LBJ’s neck. It was soon clear to anyone paying careful attention that the war was, for all practical purposes, lost.
During the second half of 1967 the administration had become alarmed by criticism, both inside and outside the government, and by reports of declining public support for its Vietnam policies. According to public opinion polls, the percentage of Americans who believed that the U.S. had made a mistake by sending troops to Vietnam had risen from 25 percent in 1965 to 45 percent by December 1967.
Tet Offensive
While the battle for Hue raged in the month of February, Generals Westmoreland and Wheeler demanded an escalation of 100,000 new combat troops. Like Stanley McChrystal would some forty years later, they tried to use the situation to twist the president’s arm. They also pushed for permission to operate (legally as opposed to how they were already operating) in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.
Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara had already soured on the war and resigned his office. The antiwar movement was filling the streets with protesters, and in those days journalism was still alive and the protests were widely reported. Public sentiment for the war was in a nosedive. The American people were coming to their senses, and the end was near...or so it would seem.
By 22 March President Johnson had informed Wheeler to "forget the 100,000" men. The President and his staff were refining a lesser version of the troop increase - a planned call-up of 62,000 reservists, 13,000 of whom would be sent to Vietnam. Three days later, at Clifford's suggestion, Johnson called a conclave of the "Wise Men". With few exceptions, all of the members of the group had formerly been accounted as hawks on the war. The group was joined by Rusk, Wheeler, Bundy, Rostow, and Clifford. The final assessment of the majority stupefied the group. According to Clifford, "few of them were thinking solely of Vietnam anymore". All but four members called for disengagement from the war, leaving the President "deeply shaken."
Lyndon Johnson was depressed and despondent at the course of recent events.
(snip)
On 31 March President Johnson announced the unilateral (although still partial) bombing halt during his television address. He then stunned the nation by declining to run for a second term in office.
Tet Offensive
The really terrible part of this story is that, even though the handwriting was on the wall as early as 1968, and a president had been destroyed by engaging in an ill-advised, immoral and costly war, there was still an appalling determination to continue the war by the CIA and the rest of the Military Industrial Complex. They couldn’t bear the thought of giving up their ‘splendid little war’ and dug in for all they were worth and dragged out the ending of the war for seven long years.
And while we argued, people died. The arguments were virtually identical to the arguments we hear today about why we can’t possibly leave Afghanistan:
Pakistan will be next to fall (see The Domino Theory)
The bad guys will take over (who exactly are the good guys?)
It will be a defeat for America (oh the shame...listen people, war is not a football game and sometimes cutting your losses and quitting is preferable to paying the price of ‘victory’...no one ever really wins in these things, and national pride is a stupid reason for killing and dying)
The problem with these arguments then and now is that our continued military presence guarantees nothing but the further loss of lives, American and others. While these arguments raged during the Vietnam War, from 1968 until we finally fled with our tails between our legs in 1975, roughly half of the total American losses took place. If we had declared victory, cut our losses and left after the Tet Offensive of 1968, some 25.000 to 30,000 American lives would have been saved...as well as millions of Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese lives. That we postponed the end for so long had tragic consequences for millions of families, and much of that suffering continues till this day.
Though the end was in sight, we dithered and argued while people died. I hate seeing us making the same mistake all over again. It seems so unnecessary.
I find it discouraging that the neocon propaganda and fear-mongering has been so successful as to hoodwink so many in the progressive community into believing that our national security depends on our obliterating the opposition in Afghanistan. Fortunately, cracks are beginning to appear in the coalition of the fearful. The following appeared recently in Britain’s The Guardian:
The dimensions of the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan are becoming bigger and more daunting by the day. Once-staunch defenders of the "good war" are starting to break ranks. Kim Howells, a former Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Afghanistan and current chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, questions in our newspaper today the central tenet of the government's case for fighting in Afghanistan: that it is the frontline of a war that would otherwise be conducted on British streets. Mr Howells said counter-terrorism would be better served by bringing the majority of servicemen home. Better, he argues, to concentrate on protecting our borders and gathering intelligence at home and abroad.
He is saying publicly what many in government must be thinking privately: that troops are dying needlessly in a war that is unwinnable , with a strategy that is unworkable, and that we should be thinking of the alternative now. We do not agree with everything Mr Howells says, but at least he is saying it, which puts him in a class above most other politicians. Mr Howells may have cast the first stone, but the current consensus is wearing so thin that it would not take much to shatter.
Afghanistan is a political failure, a fact over which the international community continue to be in denial. If they were not, neither America nor Britain would be toying with the notion that they can pressure Mr Karzai into forming a clean government. Flanked by two vice-presidents, including a notorious warlord that Mr Karzai accepted as a running mate, Mr Karzai vowed yesterday to tackle corruption. This was rather like a cat promising abstinence on the subject of mice.
Afghanistan: Groundhog day
Slaughtering people by the thousands and propping up a corrupt puppet government did not work in Vietnam and it won’t work in Afghanistan.
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Now I don’t advocate that we pack up, go home and put the Afghan people out of our minds. In fact, I believe we have a solemn obligation to make up for all the horror we brought to that country. I believe we owe them as much assistance as we can possibly give them that doesn’t involve bombs or bullets. I expect that a fraction of what we’re spending on war would go a long way toward negotiating a peaceful settlement between the various tribes and factions and bring the Afghan people together to improve their collective lot. I think what we should do instead of exacerbating the conflict is support the work of people like Greg Mortenson and our own kimoconnor at afghans4tomorrow.com. Education and the building of infrastructure coupled with a deep commitment to diplomacy and peace are what I see as the answers to the tragedy of modern Afghanistan. They have decades of war to recover from, and as long as they are occupied by a foreign army comprised of what the Afghan people consider infidels, that process is not going to begin.
I would so love to see us contributing to the solutions rather than the problems. And I would so love to see us commit ourselves to peace over war. We have so much less to fear from terrorism or foreign armies than we do from global warming and other ecological disasters that it would only make sense to convert our military machine into a different entity altogether, one devoted to the solution of real problems, the problems that actually will kill us all if we don’t get serious about them. Supporting war just so our Military Industrial Complex will have something to do is the height of folly considering the very real threats we face for which there are no military solutions. We need to face up to the harsh realities of our times and swear off our addiction to war for war’s sake ...and finally lay to rest the ghosts of Vietnam.
Escalate the peace Mr. President, not the war.