Blogs and Stories
Why Afghanistan Is No Iraq
But that same history of war makes the Afghan people realistic in their expectations about the future, and grateful for even modest progress. The sanctuary in Pakistan is a very serious problem, but the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq (largely through Syria) and the flow of advanced weapons into Iraq from Iran were huge problems, too. Drugs are a big problem in Afghanistan, but corruption including within the oil trade has been extremely problematic in Iraq. Moreover, while Afghanistan’s lack of natural resources constitutes a long-term challenge for the country, in the short term foreign resources can largely compensate, given the current commitment of the international community to this important mission.
The levels of violence in Iraq in the middle of this decade, before the surge, were far worse than anything Afghanistan has experienced since 2001. In fact, civilians were being killed at 10 times the rate in Iraq, from 2004 through the first part of 2007, than in Afghanistan now. Tens of thousands of Iraqi professionals were driven out of the country or killed; whole communities were disrupted and displaced; sectarian tensions were inflamed far more than they have been in Afghanistan.
To be sure, Afghanistan is hard enough. But on balance, stabilizing that country should be just as feasible as was stabilizing Iraq. We are far from out of the woods in Afghanistan. But it is no quagmire, no Vietnam, and no inevitable graveyard of superpowers.
Xtra Insight: The Daily Beast's Bruce Riedel: Are We Losing Afghanistan?
Michael O'Hanlon specializes in national-security policy at the Brookings Institution. He is senior author of the Iraq Index. As a defense budget analyst, he has advised members of Congress on military spending.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Clearing the Path for Karzai
Michael O'Hanlon specializes in national security policy at the Brookings Institution. He is senior author of the Iraq Index. As a defense budget analyst, he advised members of Congress on military spending.
The fallacies in this piece are too numerous to deal with all of them, so I will just concentrate on the final sentence that this is "no quagmire, no Vietnam".
I am a Vietnam Vet (1969-1970), and the parallels with what recently deceased Robert McNamara called his "egregious" error of judgment are frightening. The essence of the lesson McNamara late said America had to learn is that it is impossible to prop up a failed state through military intervention. A failed state is precisely what Afghanistan has become after President Bush's Coalition forces (they're not all NATO countries, by the way---Australia is not in NATO).
So, when O'Hanlon claims this is no Vietnam, the question would be at what point in time after C.I.A. American intervention began during the mid-fifties (about the time of the French defeat and withdrawal) is O'Hanlon talking about with his analogy. If he's talking about the Johnson/Nixon years following Golf of Tonkin Resolution in mid-sixties then, yes, Afghanistan is not as bad as the Vietnam quagmire........yet.
What O'Hanlon should be comparing our 7/8 year Afghanistan adventure to is the decade of our involvement in Vietnam prior to our massive troop escalations post-Tonkin Resolution. Firstly, it was America under Eisenhower who scrubbed the nationwide Vietnam elections (agreed to by both North and South in the Geneva Accords) and set-up a corrupt puppet government in the Southern Zone, nominally a democracy. Successive South Vietnamese oligarchy governments were unable to retain permanent control of areas outside of the Saigon and some coastal enclaves. This is precisely the nature of the corrupt, nominally democratic, government the Occupiers have set up in Afghanistan, which has little control outside of Kabul. Even that control by Occupation forces comes at the catastropic cost of countless civilian "collateral damage".
In both Vietnam and Afghanistan the American-dominated forces faced an "fanatical" enemy which has outlasted previous foreign occupastion. This is true whether or not the Occupiers' intentions were as noble as O' Hanlon claims America and its allies are supposed to be. The Soviet Union professed to have invaded to rescue the legitimate government of the day (a satellite regime like the many Eastern European countries at the time), and the Soviets wouldn't have kept throwing away billions of debt-Ruples to fund their Afghanistan occupation in what is now popularly known as Charlie Wilson's War, if they didn't irrationally fear having a pro-American puppet state in their flank.
As egregiously in error as the Bush Administration's judgment was ( e.g. Bush eventually admitted he didn't care whether he ever got the mastermind of the World Trade Center's destruction "Dead or Alive', which was THE justification for the change of regime), the level of American military involvement under Bush was similar to that of America's Vietnam involvement under Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Sadly, now we have the most liberal American President since Lyndon Johnson moving along the same slippery slope of gradual escalation which mortally undermined Johnson's "Great Society" programs. If Afghanistan Occupation generals continue to be allowed to believe that they've got yet another country in which to practice their professional skills and pump up their careers, then there will continue to be more wasted blood of soldiers, untold numbers of Afghanistan civilians, and vastly greater wasted debt-dollars, which is just as we callously did in Vietnam.
And perhaps the most compelling reason this parallel with Vietnam is valid comes down to the absence of any clearly defined exit strategy which is far more than a vague mission statement or even an exit timeline. This absence is is what made Vietnam and now makes Afghanistan a quagmire. All the Occupied armies need to do now is to Agent Orange those vast opium plantations to show the world just how tough they are.
And finally, since the only significant difference between the the Vietnam and Afghanistan invasions was, ostensibly, that the Taliban government had refused to hand over Bin Laden, then why doesn't the Obama Administration pursue him with all possible speed and steadfastness of purpose?
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.