I was watching Rachel Maddow on Thursday night; her guest was Gordon Goldstein, and she introduced him with this fascinating observation:
Amid these signals that the president may be trying to find a way to put a period on the end of this war rather than ellipses, and et cetera, a to-be-continued, the administration has made known that Gordon Goldstein‘s book about the presidential—about presidential decision-making in wartime "Lessons in Disaster, McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam" is required reading in this White House. [Emphasis added]
So I read the book. It should be required reading everywhere.
First off, Afghanistan is not Vietnam, as Rachel said at the start of the interview, and Goldstein agreed.
GOLDSTEIN: Well, one of the dramatic narratives that‘s at play today is we are watching how this president is taking command of the decision-making process. This reflects and correlates with a lesson that President Kennedy exemplified in 1961: Counselors advise, but presidents decide.
"Counselors advise, but presidents decide" is the title of his first chapter (Lesson 1). Here are the other chapters from Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam:
- Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right.
- Politics is the Enemy of Strategy
- Conviction Without Rigor Is a Recipe for Disaster
- Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends
- Intervention is a Presidential Choice, Not an Inevitability
Some historical observations from the book:
In 1961, Kennedy's first foreign crisis was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which (the invasion, not the fiasco) had been planned in the last days of the Eisenhower administration but which was left for Kennedy to give the final decision. According to Goldstein (page 40), the CIA knew (or was certain) that the invasion would fail without US military help, but for some reason Kennedy was never told this. When the invasion started to fall apart and the JCS were demanding air strikes, Kennedy refused. Quoting JFK:
"We're not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason." (Page 41, citation omitted)
How does this relate to Obama's decision-making process on Afghanistan? From the Rachel Maddow interview:
[Goldstein] In ‘61, Kennedy was encircled by his most senior advisers who urged him to make the first ground force troop deployment to South Vietnam. They said he had to send in up to six divisions or 200,000 men. But he was deeply skeptical about it. He doubted that it would be an effective mission. He had been burned at the Bay of Pigs. He told people that he would never be overawed by the advice of the military.
So, he decided himself what the strategy would be. And I think we see President Obama, particularly in the events of the past 24 hours, signaling that he is in command of this decision-making process.
Other points from Goldstein's book (and keep in mind that President Obama has made this book required reading for his national security team. It's a fast read, by the way):
(Page 138 ff) The "domino theory" (which Eisenhower was constantly pushing, especially to LBJ) was an assumption that was never examined; everyone simply assumed it must be valid. Similarly today, many people just assume that if the Taliban take over Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda will once again set up facilities there. (There is, in fact, considerable evidence to the contrary.)
(Pp 143 ff, 181 ff, and other places) The bombing campaign was put forward as a way to force North Vietnam to the negotiating table. In fact, it had the opposite effect: It stiffened their resolve, and they only started serious talks when the bombing stopped. This is a similar mindset to the neo-con insistence that "shock and awe" would not only force a quick end to Saddam, it would so impress the rest of the world that no one ever dare cross America again. It should be noted that the current policy of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not for the same purpose - it's for targeting specific figures we can't get at any other way - but it having the same effect of stiffening the resolve of the people on the ground.
(Pp 130-33, 168, etc.) There was never any rigorous analysis (or any analysis at all, really) establishing a causal relationship between the proposed military actions and the desired outcome; in fact, it was never really clear what outcome was desired.
Finally, overall there was never any grasp of the fact that the US was fighting a distant war against the indigenous people and that, at the end of the day, we would leave and they would stay. And that the people we were shooting, bombing, killing, would be able to outlast us just because of that simple truth. We also did not understand (and here Goldstein's book does not go into this as deeply as it should have) that the Vietnamese were not fighting against the ideas and philosophy of the United States; that is, they were not fighting to advance communism and to destroy capitalism. They were fighting to become independent of the colonial powers of the world - first France and then the US (as they saw us).
A similar mindset governs many of those pushing for more soldiers in Afghanistan. The Afghanis are not fighting us because "they hate our freedoms" as George Bush liked to insist. They are fighting us because we are sitting in their houses and patrolling their streets, and they don't want us there. (Also, this is a part of the world where children are born with guns in their hands and are raised on tales of centuries-long blood feuds.)
The parallels to Vietnam also include bureaucratic bickering and maneuvering, attempts to manipulate the presidential decision-making process and restrict his choices. One fascinating repetition of history is that, in Vietnam, the ambassador, Maxwell Taylor, was a former general who was vehemently opposed to the military's plan to put combat troops on the ground in Vietnam; in Afghanistan, the current ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, not just a former general but the general in command of Afghanistan from 2005-07, is firmly opposed to adding more troops there.
We don't know yet, of course, how President Obama will ultimately decide to deal with Afghanistan. But we do know that he has rejected the options the military tried to confine him to - all involving troop increases. And it is clear that he is trying to learn the proper lessons from the Vietnam disaster, which include these:
- Be skeptical of military demands, especially when they do not include an exit strategy.
- Factor in the reasons for the conflict as seen by the other side;
- Make decisions for reasons of policy, not politics. (Not doing so was LBJ's main mistake, according to Goldstein.)
- Accept that there are no good solutions to the mess. As LBJ said (page 154), whatever decision he made, "there's gonna be more killin'."
So I am hopeful he will make the right decision. Which is why we elected him.