Afghanistan will prove to be Obama’s Vietnam

The President is committing the US to intervention in Afghanistan that recalls JFK’s attempts to expel communism from Vietnam

LAST UPDATED 4:05 PM, APRIL 3, 2009

The world falls in love with a charismatic young president, his stylish wife, and their charming young children. In the campaign for the presidency he has defeated his Republican opponent in part by charging Republican failure in the war against America's enemies.

In the dawn of his administration this Harvard man musters strategic buttress from America's best and brightest for a decisive escalation by which the foe will be routed. Counter-insurgency will go hand in hand with nation-building. Corruption will be banished and local troops trained to shoulder the burden of the war.

To be sure, there are differences between Jack Kennedy's America in 1961 and Barack Obama's in 2009. At the start of the Sixties the US economy hadn’t crested. It was still on the way up. The mantra was "guns and butter". In 1961 think-tank intellectuals, defeating Vietnamese guerillas in their Top Secret memos to Kennedy and his commanders, invoked Britain's defeat of the Communist insurgency in Malaya, America's victory over the Huks in the Philippines.

An excited vibrancy coloured Obama’s rhetoric when he vowed to kill bin Laden

In 2009, veterans' hospitals here offer bleak testimony that 150,000 US troops, lavishly equipped with advanced weaponry, were held down for years in Iraq by the guerillas' rudimentary kerbside explosives.

Woe betide a president who believes his own stump speeches. In his campaign Obama outflanked charges from McCain that he was a peacenik and a wimp by declaring week after week that Iraq was the wrong battlefield, that the enemy was al-Qaeda and their sanctuary Afghanistan. An excited vibrancy coloured the community organiser's rhetoric as he spoke of his determination to "kill bin Laden".

Most people thought this pledge would get lobbed into the trash can the moment McCain conceded. But no. Last Friday I drove down Interstate 5 through the early spring blossom in Oregon's Willamette Valley, listening to Obama on the radio marching through his schedule for escalation and victory in Afghanistan.

He was born in the year JFK became president, but has this supposedly smart fellow not read a single decent history of the Vietnam war and of America's defeat? Apparently not. Otherwise how could he blithely announce that: "We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan Army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011... Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable." Nothing perishes quicker in war than "clear metrics".

Significantly, Obama did not order a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) as he evolved his plan, doubtless because he and his National Security Adviser feared such an NIE might arrive at the same sort of depressing assessment as the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism,

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Lets play a guessing game who are alqaida's and the talibans worst enemies, who can the americans go to and ask if they can rent an airbase so they can resupply their people in afghanistan without having to involve the russians or the pakistanis. answers on a postcard please

Posted by geoff campbell at 1:13pm on April 3, 2009

Yes, I fear that Alexander Cockburn is right about his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnem. The answer is not easy, but a way has to be found to prevent the USA getting bogged down in yet another war which it cannot possibly win. Try very stringent visa restrictions on people from certain countries in the area, as a start, perhaps? They can only cause great harm if they are actually in the US. Deport those who fit the criteria of becoming potential terrorists. There would be loud cries of human rights etc, but innocent young Americans and others who are being sent to Afghanistan to be slaughtered also deserve to have their human rights recognised. For me, this is the only policy of President Obama's with which I have grave misgivings.

Posted by Yolande Agble at 4:33pm on April 3, 2009

As usual Britain is rushing to lick yankee shoe-leather - this time in Afghanistan (again). No-one dare admit that the invasion was a hopeless mistake based on Bush's idiocy. And for that, young men must pay with their lives - because Gordon Brown hasn't got a SPINE. Meantime Foggy Rasmussen (another yankee patsy) has failed to become Head of NATO - not even he was sufficiently bellicose.

Posted by neil mcgowan at 10:57am on April 4, 2009

There is absolutely no way that the two conflicts can be compared.One was secular and the other religious.Afganistan is directly about us,Vietnam was about the USA.Afganistan is about containment of Islamisim,which knows no borders.These Islamists are something akin to the dark ages in Europe.We must never allow facists to dominate the world stage.they must be destroyed.

Posted by ROBERT BOYD at 6:03pm on April 4, 2009

If you simplify you do more than highlight salient details; you also file away at important facts. Occasionally this is deliberate at others, merely slack handed thinking. Afghanistan then housed, fed and trained Islamic jihadists from around the world to carry out attacks on the west. Today it just does not. The survivors are hiding in caves or more frequently among civilians in Pakistan. Their capacity to organise is now solely driven by self defence. We are and they are fighting but on their ground. The links between those that carried out attacks on the west in the latest phase of the 'long war on the west' (1970) and Afghanistan are clear and verified by other sources than American generals or spies. Many 'graduates' of jihadi training are currently in the west and it remains to be seen what this legacy of expertise will be. People died on a London bus because of it. Those of us including myself who lived amongst Pakistani immigrants twenty five years ago can attest to the rise of fundamentalism in UK cities at a time when mentions of Kabul put the learned in mind of a Victorian music hall song if it meant anything at all. I believe the US won the war in Vietnam and I also believe if she had not fought there then much of south east Asia up to the gates of India, the largest democracy in the world (one not free from the attentions of Afghan trained jihadi's) would have succumbed to communist expansion. The fact that many western progressives understood and welcomed this as much as they seemingly warm to Islamic fundamentalism is another topic altogether. The Vietnam war was woefully mismanaged and replete with great crimes; so were other wars in modern times. De-constructing the Vietnam War is over due. It has however, long since joined other famous historical examples of the genre, whereby false and misleading comparisons are derived from weak or imaginary parallels and produce unintended outcomes: Hitler springs to mind. No, the shrewd have been saying for some time that it is Pakistan, not Afghanistan which is the problem. The former has at least some tangible cultural heritage of sophistication and urbanity (Kabul was the setting for an exposition of modernism in the 1960s and was for centuries the axle in the Silk Roads). Pakistan simply does not have such a history to rescue it. References to 'the brightest and the best' and ambitious generals (let us not forget MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bomb in Korea) in the context of a misunderstood conflict forty years ago will not serve to illuminate. Here it is meretricious and misleading.

Posted by Barry Larking at 8:35am on April 16, 2009