Afghanistan Was Russia's Vietnam And Now It Will Be Obama's

Thursday I reached for Rick Perlstein's wondrous Nixonland to help make a point about how similar the tragically hubristic war in Afghanistan is to the tragically hubristic war in Vietnam. But after I found what I was looking for in the book, and quoted copiously in the post, I kept reading and found something else I want to share. Perlstein really is one of the best contemporary historians writing about American politics and if you stick with DWT long enough you'll probably wind up reading all 870 pages. This comes from page 206.

On the third anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [which passed on August 7, 1964-- only two heroic senators objecting], the president announced the authorization of forty-seven thousand more soldiers and made William Westmoreland stand on his hind legs and tell the press that that was all he'd ask for. We'd rain more bombs instead. The public overwhelmingly approved of that.

On September 3 [almost 42 years to the week before the Afghan elections which were so very, very similar], the South Vietnamese would go to the polls to elect a government for the first time since Ngo Dihn Diem won the fishy balloting of 1961, then was overthrown by the first of several military juntas. That an election was planned was proactively used to declare South Vietnamese democracy a reality. The vice-presidential candidate Nguyen Cao Ky [currently a liquor store owner in Orange County] had deployed the South Vietnamese air force to smuggle opium and gold: asked who his political heroes were, he replied, "I have only one-- Hitler." He was running for vice president virtually unchallenged and won-- and had fixed the constitution to give the real power to a military council run by the vice president. Meanwhile, back in America, that an election had just taken place was retroactively used to declare South Vietnamese democracy a reality.

...Reader's Digest's Vietnam was a nonstop procession of school reconstructions and orphanage visits by American doughboys; a typical story was about the beloved mess cook who caught a VC grenade while planning a Christmas feast for the local children... Lyndon Johnson invited a covey of Senate doves to the White House for a stag dinner. George McGovern subsequently wrote in his diary, "The president is a tortured and confused man-- literally tortured by the mess he has gotten into in Vietnam."

According to the Telegraph in the U.K., Obama has already made up his mind to escalate the war by sending McChrystal his 45,000 more bodies. If it's true, Obama will be a one-term president. Our most intellectual president in decades will have turned out to be the worst dunce since... well not counting Bush, Ulysses S Grant. He and McChrystal brushed aside the objections of Joe Biden who knows more about Afghanistan than the two of them combined. Tomorrow's NY Times Magazine features the skinny-- in 13 pages-- on this decade's General Westmoreland.

Success takes time, but how much time does Stanley McChrystal have? The war in Afghanistan is now in its ninth year. The Taliban, measured by the number of their attacks, are stronger than at any time since the Americans toppled their government at the end of 2001. American soldiers and Marines are dying at a faster rate than ever before. Polls in the United States show that opposition to the war is growing steadily.

Worse yet, for all of America’s time in Afghanistan-- for all the money and all the blood-- the lack of accomplishment is manifest wherever you go... In his initial assessment of the country, sent to President Obama early last month, McChrystal described an Afghanistan on the brink of collapse and an America at the edge of defeat. To reverse the course of the war, McChrystal presented President Obama with what could be the most momentous foreign-policy decision of his presidency: escalate or fail. McChrystal has reportedly asked for 40,000 additional American troops — there are 65,000 already here — and an accelerated effort to train Afghan troops and police and build an Afghan state. If President Obama can’t bring himself to step up the fight, McChrystal suggested, then he might as well give up.

“Inadequate resources,” McChrystal wrote, “will likely result in failure.”

The magnitude of the choice presented by McChrystal, and now facing President Obama, is difficult to overstate. For what McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge-- a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men.

McChrystal's strategy sounds good on paper-- "protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents." But it's absolutely doomed to tragic failure. The Afghan people only want one thing from America-- a quick departure and-- in the words of Rep. Alan Grayson-- "to be left alone." The Americans are alien beings in every way and seen by the Afs as the installers of the illegitimate government in Kabul.

McChrystal doesn't get it and neither does President Hope-and-Change. Are there enough members of Congress to just say no to more funding for escalation? It's building. Help it grow.