A couple of weeks ago Richard Holbrooke died, and Obama lost his special adviser on both Afghanistan and Iraq. His widely reported last words were “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan”. It’s been touted as a last-minute conversion or realisation, but the history behind it goes back decades.
Holbrooke was a substantial figure in American diplomacy, a charismatic and thoughtful man with nearly five decades of experience of the point where liberal interventionism and outright imperialism meet. His formative experiences were in Vietnam as a young man on the diplomatic and political front line from 1963, just ahead of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and LBJ’s escalation of the conflict.
Two years later he was part of Johnson’s separate Vietnam team – always a sign someone doesn’t trust the usual channels. He appears to have told the President very frankly what was going wrong, just as he did from his deathbed for Obama, though it was obvious where he stood on the later wars before he took on his final role.
Supporters of the Americans’ more recent military invasions always resist comparisons with Vietnam, and above all fear a repeat of the humiliating sight of helicopters evacuating personnel at the end, a sight which left such scars on the American establishment that even Ronald Reagan preferred to fight his imperial adventures by proxy.
But Holbrooke wasn’t afraid to make the parallels. First in 2007, “Iraq already presents us with the worst situation internationally in modern American history. Worse even than Vietnam.” Then, by 2008: “The conflict in Afghanistan will be far more costly and much, much longer than Americans realize. This war will eventually become the longest in American history, surpassing even Vietnam.”
The problem that unites these three wars isn’t primarily the stretched supply lines, dwindling support at home, unclear objectives or unreliable local allies, though they do share those things. The problem is intrinsic to being an occupying force: very few people who don’t directly benefit from imperial patronage like seeing their country run by foreign bureaucrats, retired politicians and generals. And a country with a military tradition that doesn’t want to be occupied will resist, and sooner or later they will tend to win, just as the American revolutionaries did almost three hundred years earlier.
In 1965, early in Holbrooke’s time in Vietnam, Robert Taber published The War Of The Flea, a classic review of guerilla warfare, both theory from Mao to Sun Tzu and practice from Cyprus to the Philippines. Born in Illinois, Taber was no academic bystander – in 1957 he conducted the first TV interview with Fidel Castro (shown together at left), and subsequently fought with the Cubans against the Americans at the Bay of Pigs.
The core of the book is Vietnam, though. Taber explains how familiar the North Vietnamese were with the theory of guerilla resistance, ideas like Mao’s strategic balance between space, will and time. Just as the Long March is best understood as a substantial exercise of will and a sacrifice of space to buy time, so the Vietcong understood the price of holding territory, especially cities or towns, and that the Americans’ desire to do so at all costs, most famously at Khe Sanh, would be a major part of their undoing. The translation into practice was honed as well, no surprise for a country where a guerilla army had defeated the French back when they called it Indochina, and where the young soldiers from that 1946-54 conflict were now the field commanders of the resistance to the Americans. He quotes Vo Nguyen Giap, who commanded Vietnamese armies from 1944 onwards and who is now apparently an environmental campaigner, as follows:
“The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it, and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war.”
Guerillas attack from terrain they know far better than the occupiers, and use nimble and coordinated attacks on vulnerable supply lines to capture arms and prove themselves to the local people. Clumsy reprisals against guerilla attacks build support for their actions, recruit new members and open up new safe houses. Campaigns of attrition are waged, while the set-piece battles of attrition are avoided until the end game.
The pure exercise of will in these circumstances has led to some of the most horrific scenes in war. I had thought the example from Apocalypse Now was apocryphal, but Slavoj Žižek assures me it’s real. When the Americans ran a vaccination campaign for hearts and minds, so the story goes, the Vietcong returned the children’s arms in piles, an act of unimaginable cruelty, yet one which made very clear to the Americans that their enemy was utterly determined and implacable. More broadly, the North Vietnamese leadership knew support for the war in the US was dwindling with every shipment of young men home – and it’s no coincidence that George Bush banned cameras from these events in 2003.
Afghanistan’s ongoing conflict in Helmand and beyond is broadly of the same sort. There are differences, of course – Afghan national identity counts for little, with regional and tribal loyalties coming first and ensuring that the resistance is patchy and diverse, with a real religious strand.
The wider parallels are there too, though: the Afghan defeat of the Soviets in 1989 clearly trained a generation in guerilla fighting, and as a result the current armed insurgency has access to the substantial stockpiles of weapons left behind. Calling them “Taliban” now is just shorthand, just as “mujahideen” was last time, and just as many Vietcong fighters were not necessarily “communist” – indeed, like the Cuban revolution, the Vietnamese resistance is better understood as a nationalist movement.
Writing in 1969 for the introduction to the second edition, Taber notes that “the first printing of The War of the Flea was bought in its entirety by various branches of the United States armed services“, keen to learn how they could prove him wrong and win in Vietnam. With an impressive certainty, four years ahead of the American withdrawal, he observes that “it can make little difference“, and indeed it did not. There can be no doubt that Holbrooke, later an author of one of the volumes of the Pentagon Papers, will have been one of those readers from the American diplomatic and military establishment.
Whether or not it influenced him, Holbrooke knew what Taber knew, and it applies now too. Even if you assume victory in Afghanistan on the terms of the American and British occupying forces to be genuinely desirable, it cannot be achieved. Time to go.
Postscript:
The Pentagon Papers include the following summary of why the Americans fought on. The overwhelming reasons for staying in Afghanistan are surely the same, perhaps replacing “Chinese” with ISI.
- 70% – To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.
- 20% – To keep [South Vietnam] (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
- 10% – To permit the people [of South Vietnam] to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
- ALSO – To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.
- NOT – To ‘help a friend’
Also, I found out while writing this that others have made the same comparison. First, the Economist, who are more sceptical about the read-across, and Daniel White (where the top comment is by Taber’s son, confirming he died in 1995). Tangentially, Time Magazine heard from Taber and McGuinness in the Bogside in 1972.
#1 by DougtheDug on December 31, 2010 - 2:11 pm
In 1946 after the Japanese defeat, the US simply handed Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia back to the French as colonies rather than declaring them independent states.
The Vietnamese Viet Minh army who had fought the Japanese were not at that time intrinsically hostile to the US and in fact Ho Chi Minh asked the US in 1945 to make Vietnam a US protectorate similar to the Phillippines as a precursor to full independence but after the US handed it back to the French the Vietnamese war of independence against the French started.
When the US entered the war against the Vietnamese after the French defeat in 1954 by supporting the post-colonial puppet regime in the South and by sending combat trooops in 1965 as the South started to crumble they had a strategic purpose, to stop Vietnam becoming a communist nation. It was a war of ideology for the US but a national liberation war for the Vietnamese.
There is a lack of information about why the US is in Afghanistan. There was a purpose in the US war in Vietnam and the world knew why they were fighting there but there is no agreed reason why the US are in Afghanistan.
That’s the big difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam. No-one really know why the US has made such a huge military committment in Afghanistan. It wasn’t communist, it wasn’t under Russian or Chinese control and the 9/11 hi-jackers were comprised of 15 Saudis, two from the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian and one Lebanese. The Taliban even offered to hand Osama bin Laden over if the US provided evidence that linked him to the 9/11 hijackings.
It’s going to be difficult to predict what the US will do in Afghanistan because we don’t really know why they’re there.
Caspian oil and gas? There are vast deposits just north of Afghanistan in the Caspian Sea basin.
Iranian oil and gas? Control of Afghanistan along with Iraq puts the US on both Iran’s western and eastern borders.
Pipeline routes? Control of Iran would give US oil companies the direct easy overland route they crave from the Caspian sea to the Indian Ocean and even Afghanistan could be used as a pipeline route if Pakistan is willing.
China? To ensure that China doesn’t have a free hand in Central Asia with its oil and gas resources.
Russia? To ensure that pipelines for oil and gas from the Caspian basin don’t route out through Russia which gives Russia control of the resource.
The scariest reason is simply that the US needed a war after 9/11. They had to go out and bomb somebody in retaliation and they weren’t that fussy about the reasons why. If that’s the case then British soldiers and Afghan civilians have been dying simply because the US wanted a war to vent some frustration and because the UK Government just does what it’s told.
#2 by Bugger (the Panda) on December 31, 2010 - 3:48 pm
Dougthe Dug
I had in the back of my head that the British had actually run Vietnam before handing it back to the French. This was told to me by a Dutch friend who, as a child was interned by the Japanese in what is now Indonesia and was then a Dutch colony.
I checked Wikipedia and low and behold he was right. A carve up happened after the WWII in Asia between the victorious allies, Britain, The US and China.
It was decided that Vietnam was to be returned to France and the British landed there to reoccupy S Vietnam whilst the North was undr the care of China.
The British apparently re-engaged some residual Japanese forces and interned Pétainists and retook the South. They then passed their mandate back the official French (de Gaulle) when they arrived.
#3 by James on December 31, 2010 - 6:24 pm
It really was the eastern end of the Great Game. I’m trying to find a reference, but I think only the middle third of Thailand escaped colonisation altogether.
#4 by DougtheDug on December 31, 2010 - 8:26 pm
Bugger (the Panda),
Yes, the British were in Vietnam immediately after the end of the Second War to disarm the Japanese and to hold the fort until the French showed up though it was in fact the Indian Army that was used. Apparently one of the reasons that Britain was happy about a French return was that Churchill thought an independent Indochina would damage Britain’s hold on India and on the rest of the Britain’s asian empire.
“The (20th Indian) Division’s main job was to disarm the 70,000 Japanese troops in Indochina and maintain law and order until the French arrived in large numbers.”
This is from, http://www.britains-smallwars.com/Vietnam/Opening.htm
The Churchill reference I got from an excellent book about Vietnam called, “A Bright Shining Lie”, by Neil Sheehan. You’ll find it on Amazon.
The reasons for the Vietnam war are well documented as were the US’es objectives there but we still reallly don’t know why the US has been in Afghanistan for the last nine years which is over twice the length of the US involvement in WWII which lasted just under four years.
Is it an oil war or a war to give the US a geopolitical foothold in Central Asia in competition with Russia and China or is it just a long mad rage driven shootout which has become the playground of US forces and a proving ground for new weaponry? What were the US’es objectives in Afghanistan?
A pertinent question to ask in this country is what were our objectives in Afghanistan and was our presence there a success? It’s difficult to measure whether the UK forces won, lost or drew because it’s very difficult to pin down any politician in either Labour’s last Government or this Con-Lib one on what they were actually trying to do there.
#5 by cynicalHighlander on December 31, 2010 - 9:07 pm
Bob Feldman : A People’s History of Afghanistan /Conclusion
The whole series was well worth reading.
#6 by cynicalHighlander on December 31, 2010 - 9:17 pm
And meant to add this Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault this is also going on in Afghanistan.
Google ‘death made in America’ if you have a strong stomach.
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