and in honor of the recent elections...

[winterbadger]

A NPS research professor and a retired FSO look at Afghanistan and some uncomfortable historical parallels

ETA: Sorry, NPS<>National Park Service, NPS=Naval Postgraduate School; FSO=Foreign Service Officer

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Thanks. While I agree with the parallels he draws, and I especially see the point of his last sentence, I think his article spends too much time trying to draw comparisons with Vietnam and too little time considering how the US Armed Forces (and the US national command authority) are different now from what they were in 1964-75. We are not in the situation of old generals re-fighting the last war here, though we may well be in a situation of underlying cultural prejudices that remain entrenched in the US military officer culture coming back to blind us from what we should really be seeing there.

[winterbadger]

I think their point is that while the US armed forces may be different to those of Vietnam, we're not--at least at the moment--fighting the war in Afghanistan any smarter than we did the one in Vietnam. In fact, we seem to have lost some of the lessons we learned both in VN and, painfully, over the last nine years in Iraq.

Some of the problem is that Afghanistan has always been the left-handed, red-headed stepchild of the GWOT (or whatever we're calling it this week). NATO hasn't wanted to send many troops. We've been reluctant to pursue a long-term approach because it would have meant substantially increasing the armed forces' size.

From Vietnam, from Malaya, from Kenya, from Ireland, from the Philippines, from the Second Boer War, we know that to defeat a guerrilla insurgency you have to take away their ability to (as Mao says) swim among the people like a fish in the sea. Either by redistributing the people (so often the British invention of concentration camps is forgotten...) or by protecting them in place from the guerrillas. Without security, people will never be willing to trust the government.