A recent article I saw somewhere stated that a lot of Vietnam veterans are having an unwelcome recollection of the end of that war. One Vietnam vet I know personally told me that.
And the reason why is that they're seeing an abandonment of a cause we fought for in Afghanistan, just like we did in Vietnam.
It's an open question how long a democratic country can maintain a fight against an enemy that doesn't threaten to overrun it. The US fought for four years in the Civil War over what the nation would be, and twice that long to bring the nation into existence in the 1770s and 1780s. World War Two was fought, by the US, for four years as well. All those wars, and others, were fought to a conclusion, so obviously the US will do that. We more or less did that with Iraq, actually completing what we had started with the second Gulf War.
We didn't do that with Vietnam. We entered, in a minor way, in 1958 and left officially in 1973, but in reality we didn't really get rolling until 1964 and had pretty much gotten out by 1972. Still, Vietnam was a pretty long war by American standards, and we'd grown tired of the whole thing by 1968. Nixon was elected on a promise to get us out, which he did.
By the time we left Vietnam the American Army had basically been destroyed. Not a battlefield destruction by any means, the NVA and the VC were not capable of doing that. But its moral had completely been destroyed. Of the four services, probably the Marines and the Air Force were in the best shape. The Navy actually experienced a late war mutiny on an aircraft carrier, showing how bad things were for it. That's important to know, but it doesn't change the fact that we entered Vietnam in strength in 1965, converted the war to an American style war, were complicit by omission in the assassination of its civilian head of state, and then left. The US could have prevented the North Vietnamese victory in 1975 by the application of air power, but we chose not to.
That may beg the question of what would have occurred in the war had the US simply not become involved. Frankly, the Republic of Vietnam stood a good chance of falling on its own. But we did become involved and even had a bit of a role in seeing a non-democratic civilian government become a series of military ones. Only the first one arguably understood the country itself.
Intervening in a nation militarily imposes obligations on a country, wish for them or not. Wars don't end when the party initiating them concludes they're over. They end when both parties do. When we left Vietnam we did so under a fiction that we were turning the war over (back?) to the South Vietnamese. But we'd converted the war's nature into something else by that time, and taught the ARVN to fight like the US Army, with US equipment, and US airpower. It's no wonder the rank and file of the ARVN collapsed in 1975. They no longer had all of that like they had before.
And that's what is going to happen in Afghanistan.
Somebody whose feed I get on Facebook, at least for the time being, claims that we entered Afghanistan on a limited "punitive expedition" and should have gotten right back out. There's some merit to that claim, but that isn't what we did at all. Indeed, we botched the war there right from the onset, and that set the path for the next twenty years.
Donald Rumsfeld, who just died recently, was Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense and therefore was familiar with punitive expeditions. The US reaction to the Mayaguez's taking by Cambodia was sort of that. But by the time he was George Bush II's Secretary of Defense, he'd become a member of the technology v. troops trap that has so often ensnared Americans.
Moreover, while U.S. troops first touched ground in October 2001, the US put the war on a back burner preferring instead to take on Iraq in a war that was completely unconnected with the 9/11 attacks and which didn't need to be fought, or if it did, it didn't need to be fought at that time.
Indeed, often missed in the story of "America's longest war" is the fact that the US never committed to it in the way that was either required or really military necessary. At a high point, in 2011, there were 98,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which is a lot, but pales in comparison to the 500,000 men commitment that was made to Vietnam and Korea. Of course, those were large wars in comparison as well. By and large, however, the US kept its commitment to Afghanistan low and slow, which meant that the Taliban was able to adjuster, and for that matter so was Al Queada. That kept the war running. In December 2002, well after the US commitment had commenced, there were still just under 10,000 US troops in the country.
Fighting guerilla wars isn't easy to start with, but to really have caught and addressed the Taliban, the initial commitment should have been heavy and exclusive. We never did that.
It's also easy to now forget that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed until May 2011. It took us a full decade to achieve that goal, which had been part of the initial goal in the first instance. Having engaged the war in Afghanistan in 2001, and having not achieved that goal until a decade later, those who argue that the effort was to be a punitive raid have more or less missed that point.
As we were in the country for that length of time, it was necessary to attempt to restore a functioning Afghani civil government. But that sort of thing takes a very long time, which we should have been well aware of. As we're addressing in another post on a completely unrelated topic, democracy isn't instinctive and building a democratic culture takes a very long time. Germany and Japan, which had functioning parliamentary systems that were not completely democratic, but which did function, flunked it in the mid 20th Century and didn't achieve democracy until they were occupied after World War Two. China, which started off attempting in 1911, has never pulled it off. The US, our own example, started off with the reputation of being radically democratic, but only 6% of the population could vote in the country's first democratic election.
Given this, we can't really expect the Afghani government to be stable for a long time. It's had twenty years, some might note, but many nations have taken longer than that.
And its military is collapsing in the face of a Taliban onslaught. The best we can now hope for is that some regions of the country will become self-governing under their own local warlords. Not a cheery thought, but the best one. A 30,000 man strong body of Afghani commandos continues to fight well, but they are about it. The best they can hope for is that the Afghan central government becomes one more contesting force, sort of in the model of Lebanon of the 1970s.
None of this had to be. We could have avoided this by fighting the war intelligently and according to well established military principals in 2001 and 2002. But we botched that.
Having failed that, that committed us to the long haul. That would mean keeping some troops, and more particularly air assets, in the country for a long time, perhaps another twenty years. If that seems outrageous, we've now had troops in Europe since they landed in Italy in 1943, and some forces on Japanese soil that have been there since 1945. Our troops in the Philippines were there, under somewhat analogous conditions, from 1898 until the country was really made free in 1945, and continued on for various reasons decades after that. We've been in South Korean since 1950 in a technical state of halted hostilities.
When we left Vietnam in 1972 it took three years for the country to fall, giving the US the hoped for illusion of "peace with honor" that Nixon had hoped for, even as he knew the country would fall. The country has followed the Communist path since then, with all that entails, including a slow move towards a market economy directed from above. Lenin's New Economic Policy may never have taken root in the USSR, but it seems to have elsewhere in the Communist world, save for the Stalinist theme park of North Korea. No such hope can be realistically conveyed for an Afghanistan with the Taliban back in power. It never had any interest in anything other than a strict Islamic rule. And that's what is most likely to return in that country. We'll be complicit in that.
Addendum
Prior to the US announcing its intent to withdraw during the late portion of the Trump Presidency, total non Afghani forces supporting the government amount to 7,500 troops, of which 2,500 were Americans. The Afghan National Army was doing 98% of the fighting.
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