Josh Xiong: Afghanistan is Not Vietnam
[Josh Xiong is a third year University of Toronto undergraduate specializing in International Relations and Economics. He is Opinion Editor of the Toronto Globalist, a student-run international affairs magazine, and author of the blog Neocon Blues, which can be found at joshxiong.com.]
This Foreign Policy [Johnson and Mason's 'Saigon 2009'] essay suffers from the misguided human tendency to read too much into the historical past...
... What Johnson and Mason leave out is that Vietnam was much more ethnically homogenous than tribally diverse Afghanistan. They also leave out the fact that the Vietnam War had an organized opposition, lead by a charismatic Ho Chi Minh, fighting for a common purpose; the tendency of Afghanistan is to resist any central authority whatsoever, domestic or foreign, as it divides itself among a litany of warlords and tribal chiefs.
The essay continues:
As Andrew Krepinevich noted many years ago, the army failed in Vietnam because it insisted on fighting a war of maneuver to “find, fix, and destroy” the enemy (with what became known as “search and destroy missions”) instead of protecting the people in the villages. Today these tactics are called “sweep and clear missions,” but they are in essence the same thing — clearing tiny patches of ground for short periods in a big country in hopes of killing enough enemy to make him quit. But its manpower pool was not North Vietnam’s Achilles heel and neither is it the Taliban’s. Almost exactly the same percentage of personnel in Afghanistan has rural reconstruction as its primary mission (the Provincial Reconstruction Teams) as had “pacification” (today’s “nation-building”) as their primary mission in Vietnam, about 4 percent. The other 96 percent is engaged in chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside, exactly what the enemy wants us to do.
But this is subject to change. The reason David Petraeus has been sent to keep watch over Afghanistan is because his counterinsurgency doctrine broke away from the “clear and sweep” model. Instead of focusing on military targets, Petraeus emphasized holding pacified areas to gain the trust of civilians and to afford protection for meanginful reconstruction. Moreover, Petraeus called for “living among the people,” so as to gain their support and their local intelligence. It is not hard to believe Petraeus will apply the same or similar philosophy from Kandahar to Kabul.
Meanwhile the political failure in Kabul is Saigon déjà vu. A government that is seen as legitimate by 85 or 90 percent of the population is considered the sine qua non of success by counterinsurgency experts. After the Diem coup, this was never possible in Vietnam, as one incompetent and utterly corrupt government succeeded another. None was legitimate in the eyes of the people. Contemporary descriptions of the various Saigon governments read almost exactly like descriptions of the Karzai government today. Notwithstanding all the fanfare over this week’s presidential voting in Afghanistan, the Kabul government will never be legitimate either, because democracy is not a source of legitimacy of governance in Afghanistan and it never has been. Legitimacy in Afghanistan over the last thousand years has come exclusively from dynastic and religious sources.
There’s a contradiction in this analogy. The U.S. puppets in Vietnam had no legitimacy precisely because they lacked democratic approval from the larger population. As Johnson and Mason themselves put it, Diem’s successors were “corrupt and incompetent.” Afghanistan’s leaders are losing legitimacy despite their democratic nature. Despite similar end results, the causes are not the same.
If Afghanistan’s tribalism and ethnic divisions pose the largest challenge to a successful nation-building effort, Johnson and Mason should make that argument. What they shouldn’t do is make analogies on the simple basis that the U.S. struggled in Vietnam then and is struggling in Afghanistan now. Due to variations in ethnic make-up, geography, political culture, and political loyalties, Vietnam and Afghanistan could not be more different from each other. Thus, different strategies are called for and separate historical lessons need to be drawn.
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
This Foreign Policy [Johnson and Mason's 'Saigon 2009'] essay suffers from the misguided human tendency to read too much into the historical past...
... What Johnson and Mason leave out is that Vietnam was much more ethnically homogenous than tribally diverse Afghanistan. They also leave out the fact that the Vietnam War had an organized opposition, lead by a charismatic Ho Chi Minh, fighting for a common purpose; the tendency of Afghanistan is to resist any central authority whatsoever, domestic or foreign, as it divides itself among a litany of warlords and tribal chiefs.
The essay continues:
As Andrew Krepinevich noted many years ago, the army failed in Vietnam because it insisted on fighting a war of maneuver to “find, fix, and destroy” the enemy (with what became known as “search and destroy missions”) instead of protecting the people in the villages. Today these tactics are called “sweep and clear missions,” but they are in essence the same thing — clearing tiny patches of ground for short periods in a big country in hopes of killing enough enemy to make him quit. But its manpower pool was not North Vietnam’s Achilles heel and neither is it the Taliban’s. Almost exactly the same percentage of personnel in Afghanistan has rural reconstruction as its primary mission (the Provincial Reconstruction Teams) as had “pacification” (today’s “nation-building”) as their primary mission in Vietnam, about 4 percent. The other 96 percent is engaged in chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside, exactly what the enemy wants us to do.
But this is subject to change. The reason David Petraeus has been sent to keep watch over Afghanistan is because his counterinsurgency doctrine broke away from the “clear and sweep” model. Instead of focusing on military targets, Petraeus emphasized holding pacified areas to gain the trust of civilians and to afford protection for meanginful reconstruction. Moreover, Petraeus called for “living among the people,” so as to gain their support and their local intelligence. It is not hard to believe Petraeus will apply the same or similar philosophy from Kandahar to Kabul.
Meanwhile the political failure in Kabul is Saigon déjà vu. A government that is seen as legitimate by 85 or 90 percent of the population is considered the sine qua non of success by counterinsurgency experts. After the Diem coup, this was never possible in Vietnam, as one incompetent and utterly corrupt government succeeded another. None was legitimate in the eyes of the people. Contemporary descriptions of the various Saigon governments read almost exactly like descriptions of the Karzai government today. Notwithstanding all the fanfare over this week’s presidential voting in Afghanistan, the Kabul government will never be legitimate either, because democracy is not a source of legitimacy of governance in Afghanistan and it never has been. Legitimacy in Afghanistan over the last thousand years has come exclusively from dynastic and religious sources.
There’s a contradiction in this analogy. The U.S. puppets in Vietnam had no legitimacy precisely because they lacked democratic approval from the larger population. As Johnson and Mason themselves put it, Diem’s successors were “corrupt and incompetent.” Afghanistan’s leaders are losing legitimacy despite their democratic nature. Despite similar end results, the causes are not the same.
If Afghanistan’s tribalism and ethnic divisions pose the largest challenge to a successful nation-building effort, Johnson and Mason should make that argument. What they shouldn’t do is make analogies on the simple basis that the U.S. struggled in Vietnam then and is struggling in Afghanistan now. Due to variations in ethnic make-up, geography, political culture, and political loyalties, Vietnam and Afghanistan could not be more different from each other. Thus, different strategies are called for and separate historical lessons need to be drawn.