Vietnaming It
DC’s alive these days with Vietnam analogies which, thanks to today’s news, probably will rear up again, newly re-envigorated.
Before we get to the news of Abdullah Abdullah’s election pullout, here are the fundamentals of the analogy, compliments of a Financial Times analysis that flogged the dead Vietnam horse – it’s more of a zombie-like Vietnam horse, because inexplicably, it still has life and keeps clopping along — before Abdullah made his announcement yesterday.
… the more influential war is being fought politically on the ground in America. Somehow, the compulsions of US politics have brought the candidate who electrified America by promising to pull out of Iraq to a position where many of his most ardent backers fear he may be about to get America into another Vietnam.
The decision, much like the one by Lyndon Johnson to step up involvement in Indochina, could prove to be the most important Mr Obama takes in office. It presents America’s most liberal president in a generation with a classic dilemma between guns and butter that is only likely to deepen, whatever choice he makes.
“What began as an almost reflex debating stance on the campaign trail – that George W. Bush had started the wrong war in Iraq and that Hillary Clinton had voted for it – has brought us to this moment,” says Daniel Markey at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Only now is the president really analysing the implications of escalation in Afghanistan. And they are potentially paralysing.”
Some believe the analogies with Vietnam are overdone: The US lost almost 60,000 lives in south-east Asia against the 797 it has so far lost in Afghanistan. But the parallels are also inescapable. Much like LBJ, Mr Obama is being dragged reluctantly into a war that threatens to interfere with an ambitious domestic programme of liberal reform. Much like LBJ, Mr Obama is surrounded by the “best and the brightest”, many of whom are urging the president to take the advice of the military, which appears to be nearly unanimous.
And much like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan is viewed in Washington as a proxy for a larger ideological battle – the former against worldwide communism, today against Islamist terrorism. In both cases, the president is asked to take a gamble on the response of complex faraway societies that are only fleetingly understood. In both cases, there is a recurring suspicion that the smartest minds at the Pentagon are looking for a nail to fit their hammer.
FT’s Vietnam troop escalation analysis acknowledges the Vietnam and Afghan conflicts are in scale orders of magnitude apart, but fails to note that LBJ’s escalation was in all respects dramatically different from what Obama is being asked to consider. Not simply in numbers and strategy, but in how we, to include Obama himself, all got here politically and militarily. The suggestion that he has been “dragged reluctantly” into this conflict ignores the history of the past decades and Obama’s own campaign.
But most fundamentally, the “best and brightest” now advising the president are not lost in some antiquated conventional warfare paradigm of unstoppable US military might. They actually have a clue how to do counterinsurgency, something the U.S. military command in Vietnam didn’t fully embrace until after LBJ was out of office. Until the US public and politicians had long gone south on the effort, dooming it. Which is the one part of the Vietnam analogy that rings true, the part about losing the war at home. (FT gets points for highlighting the uselessness of John Kerry, the diplomatic hero of Kabul, who mounts a fence once he gets back home to Washington. At least he didn’t throw his, or someone’s, medals at the White House. That’s a positive evolution, I guess.)
FT notes the dramatic difference in the scale of U.S. death between Vietnam and Afghanistan, but fails to note that the real tragedy of Vietnam was the wasting of those 58,000 lives, and the sacrifice of millions of others in Southeast Asia thanks to U.S. abandonment when the military had effectively destroyed the Viet Cong, and counterinsurgency and Vietnamization were beginning to succeed.
On to today’s developments. The news this morning is that whole Afghan project just got a big complicating factor. Here is where much Vietnam-like danger lurks, specifically the danger of fast-forwarding it to the abandonment part.
Abdullah Abduallah pulls out of the election, saying a legitimate result is not possible, effectively handing a tainted result to Karzai. Obama admin’s initial response is a shrug. NYT:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, traveling in Abu Dhabi, gave the administration’s only comment on Saturday in response to the reports that Mr. Abdullah might withdraw. “We see that happen in our own country where, for whatever combination of reasons, one of the candidates decides not to go forward,” she said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election. It’s a personal choice which may or may not be made.”
… Mr. Abdullah concluded that without major changes to the election system, a second round would be as fraudulent as the first. His demands included the firing of the chief of the Independent Electoral Commission, which collected and counted the ballots, and the closing of hundreds of suspected “ghost” polling centers — fictional voting sites that were instrumental in allowing Mr. Karzai’s supporters to manufacture fake ballots. Mr. Karzai refused.
Those close to Mr. Karzai said there was a simple explanation for Mr. Abdullah’s withdrawal. Muhammad Ismail Yoon, a university professor close to Mr. Karzai, said Mr. Abdullah knew that if he went through with a second round, the Afghans would desert him. “No one invests in a loser in Afghanistan,” he said.
Political crisis? Sure looks like one. How deep, hard to tell. It will be interesting to see whether Kerry gets back on a plane to talk Abdullah back in, or to effect some other stop-gap.
Washington Post, with a little more reax, suggests this may be sorted out somewhere short of crisis.
Karzai’s political campaign, in a statement late Sunday, said campaign officials had hoped Abdullah would participate in the runoff to “strengthen popular power” and constitutional rule. In light of his withdrawal, they said they would respect “whatever decision is made” by the election commission and other legal agencies. They refrained from criticizing Abdullah and said they hoped to “complete the election process with national unity.”
If the election goes ahead, it would still have Abdullah’s name on the ballot, but Karzai would presumably become winner by default and take office for another five-year term.
Analysts noted that Afghan officials took pains to avoid divisive rhetoric in reacting to Abdullah’s decision, clearly hoping to prevent an outbreak of political violence and implying there might still be a chance for reconciliation. By the same token, foreign diplomats and agencies portrayed his actions in a reasonable light and avoided suggesting whether the runoff should still be held.
The head of the U.N. mission here, Norwegian Kai Eide, said Abdullah had acted in a “dignified and statesmanlike way” during his election campaign, but that it was now important to “bring this electoral process to a conclusion in a legal and timely manner.”
The U.S. embassy, in a similarly worded statement, said that Abdullah had “emphasized a committment to serving the nation,” and that U.S. officials “fully endorse his emphasis on national unity.” It said the U.S. goverment would wait for the election panel’s decision and “looks forward to working with the next Afghan administration.”
Looks like everyone wants to put a figleaf or maybe a manhole cover on this crisis. Which for the moment is good news.
Because the spectre of illegitimate government has the ability to scare up a real Vietnam nightmare. The deepest political crisis Afghanistan would face is not the derailing of one contested election, or the extension of Karzai’s controversial reign, hopefully conditional on some further measure to establish legitimate government.
The most dangerous political instability and risk of crisis for Afghanistan lurks in Washington DC, in the potential for a decision by the United States to throw up its hands and use a young, stressed democracy’s growing pains as an excuse for abandonment, out of fear of enlivening that other bogeyman of the Vietnam analogy … the propping-up of a tainted government. The two most stable power bases in Afghanistan right now are the United States military and the Taliban, and everything going forward … including Afghanistan’s chances for legitimate government … depends on how they play their hands. If the United States wants a legitimate government and broader regional stability, both vital global security interests, the United States can’t use a failed election as an excuse to abandon Afghanistan. That is the one sure way to fully resurrect another Vietnam.
Juan Cole: “Instability in Afghanistan. A great victory for Joe Biden!” OK, that’s not exactly how he put it … no, wait a minute, that pretty much is how he put it.
Rolling Stone, “The Generals’ Revolt.” It’s all about Petraeus running for president and the GOP trying to undermine Obama. Joe Biden, BTW, is a towering Kennedy-like strategic genius.
NYT: AQ and a Waziristan-based Afghan Taliban big played a role in the Kabul UN attack. Damn, that complicates the wack-a-mole gaming. Someone tell Joe Biden that al-Qada, the Taliban, Afghanistan and Pakistan all have something to do with each other. Jawa: Shocking …
Ignatius on some of the real contradictions of war in Afghanistan … and the false ones in Washington DC.
Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly and Tim Sullivan, “McChrystal Lite: How to lose a war by splitting the difference.”
HotAir with Vietnamization fan Barbara Boxer. Vid of her retreating from questions about retreating. Allahpundit, BTW, suspects last week’s Dover trip signals no abandonment. I’m not convinced: You need to show you care when you render someone’s sacrifice meaningless.
Just One Minute with the great news for the Facilitator-in-Chief: He has factions to facilitate. That’s good, because if it was just about fighting a war to win, that would be scary. And probably wrong.
Neptunus Lex: Impressively incandescent medocrities, has their like ever been seen? I’d say, yeah … dime a dozen in the span of human history.
Different, not unrelated, via Surber. Bush: Put India on the Security Council. Biggest democracy in Asia is also the biggest multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy in the world … and largely though not entirely peaceful, with several long-running insurgencies. It gets complex, regarding our current interests in the region, given as-yet strained relations with Pakistan, now playing out in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Mumbai. But on merits alone, India has a better claim that China.
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Topics: Afghanistan, Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:01 am on Sunday, November 1, 2009
5 Responses to “Vietnaming It”
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November 1st, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Yeah, but how’s Obama’s Really Important War on Fox News going?
November 1st, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] Every war is Vietnam, when you are a Democrat. Last year’s “real war” is this year, I dunno, what do YOU want to [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:33 am
From a recent WaPo article…. “President Obama recently defended American combat in Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” not a “war of choice.”
I suspect the “war of necessity” comment was made to demonstrate his Presidential prowess with no thought whatsoever as to what was necessary to ‘win’. Even though war has been declared by UBL (’96 and ‘98 fatwas), too much emphasis has been placed on a PC response. Maj. Stephen Coughlin (To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad) and Raymond Ibrahim (Words Matter in the War on Terror) accurately describe important issues that have been ignored to our detriment.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:24 am
Those playing the Vietnam game in relation to any war or front of a war we’re currently involved in are the same enemy loving filth that caused so many millions of deaths the first time they played their games.
*C4, the lot of em.
* C4 - Congenital. C**ts, Cowards, C***suckers, Commie bast***s.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:26 am
Oh, forgot to add:
There is no greater direct aid and comfort that can be given to an enemy than working to take your own side out of the fight so that the enemy has a free hand to accomplish its goals.