A NEW president with a strong domestic agenda and a career-long lack of interest in foreign policy inherits a distant war and feels he has to demonstrate his toughness: That was LBJ and Vietnam.
Will Afghanistan be President Obama’s Vietnam, with Pakistan as Cambodia on steroids?
Such comparisons have already been made, but miss the mark. The core reason we failed in Vietnam was our largesse: We poured in so much wealth that we corrupted the Vietnamese leadership, from presidents down to battlefield commanders, beyond all utility. We became North Vietnam’s best allies, destroying South Vietnam from within.
Our troops fought bravely, but infusions of well-intentioned aid undercut every success. All of the other reasons for our failure, from then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s arrogance through a long misreading of the war’s nature, were secondary. Instead of inspiring self-sacrifice in our counterparts, we generated a kleptocracy.
Like the Taliban (and al Qaeda), the North Vietnamese had the advantage of poverty. The strategic goal of the leadership cadres in Hanoi never wavered.
Now we’re “Vietnamizing” Afghanistan: dumping so much wealth on a poor country that we’re turning pickpockets into world-class thieves.
President Hamid Karzai is despised where he isn’t hated. The people view his government as corrupt and untrustworthy – and it is. A weak man, Karzai’s unwilling to stand up to warlords and narcos. Anxious to retain his illusory power, he takes our support for granted.
Karzai’s constant harping on American military “excesses” every time the Taliban claims the corpses holding Kalashnikovs were just discussing Oprah’s latest book-club pick is meant to please the locals – at our expense.
But we can’t see an alternative to Karzai. Our bad, not his.
The bitter truth (as in Vietnam) is that we still haven’t decided what we really want to achieve. We babble about nation-building where there’s no nation to build, just a premedieval mosaic of tribes that hate each other. And the Taliban are homeboys.
We want Afghans to be like us. They never will be. (Good morning, Vietnam!)
If we want to alter the strategic environment amid a foreign population, we must be clear on three things: what we want to achieve, what the target population wants – and how much of what we want that population’s willing to accept.
Washington is vague and naive on all three points.
Another 30,000 US troops? Fine. As long as they have clear, achievable missions. More nonmilitary aid? OK. Tell us specifically what it will accomplish. And mark the bills.
We can’t bear any more of the Bush-Clinton-Bush approach of sending troops and mountains of aid in the nebulous hope that something good will happen.
Can anyone in the Obama administration articulate what we intend to achieve in Afghanistan? The Bush folks couldn’t. I doubt this bunch can either.
If our goal is to turn Afghanistan into a rule-of-law democracy, forget it. Iraq has an outside shot – it’s a semi-modern society – although success is far from guaranteed. But a modernized Afghan state whose authority extends into every remote valley is an impossibility.
If, however, our goal is only to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a massive terrorist mother-ship, we can do that – and at a lower cost. But we’d have to have the guts to choose sides among factions and stop pretending that we’re honest brokers.
The impending troop surge faces the danger of LBJ-era accounting: the recurring conclusion that just one more rise in troop levels will tip the scales. You wind up with half a million troops deployed and a local population that wants you gone yesterday.
Inherently, this one’s a special-operations war. A sounder long-term approach would be fewer troops on the ground – and far less reliance on vulnerable supply routes through Pakistan. Regular combat units have a role to play, but as punitive strike forces, not a vast neighborhood watch (this is not Iraq).
Ditch the claptrap that we can’t kill our way out of this: Well-focused killing, for decades, is our only chance – and Afghanistan’s. And dump the feel-good platitudes. In the real world off-campus, good marksmanship trumps good will.
Every conflict is different. A comparatively easy affair (which we made hard), Iraq was ripe for its surge. But in Afghanistan – as in Vietnam – a surge will bring us tactical wins, but not decisive progress (and toward what?).
Success in Afghanistan – or anywhere – demands a clear vision of an attainable end-state; a realistic approach to achieving it, and time.
If they don’t want it, we can’t get it. We can’t buy Afghan patriotism – at least not for more than five minutes.
Let’s not turn Kabul into a second-rate Saigon because we convinced ourselves that spending more money and sending more troops is a substitute for a strategy.