Tim Fernholz: The Vietnamization of Afghanistan
Obama's choices in Afghanistan will either break the Democrats' association with Vietnam or confirm it.
The Nixon administration, elected on a promise to end the Vietnam War via"peace with honor," described its strategy as"Vietnamization": building the capacity of the Vietnamese armed forces so that American troops could leave.
Today, we have different catchphrases but similar ideas. After requests for more troops and resources from on-the-ground commanders, Sen. Carl Levin, the influential chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced his opposition to sending more American soldiers to Afghanistan but has proposed a"surge of Afghanistan security forces." Which is to say, Afghanistan-ization.
We've seen this before. In 2003, the Bush administration flirted with similar strategies in Iraq but strongly resisted comparisons with the Vietnam War. The Republican Party in general has denied the lessons of Vietnam, long associated with two Democratic presidents and ended by a Republican, however disgraced. With a Democratic administration now in power, the specter of Vietnam is hanging over U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan. Democrats, still haunted by the legacy of that conflict, are trying to apply its lessons to today's war.
The return of the Vietnam comparisons is partially a question of personnel. Of President George W. Bush's top advisers, only Secretary of State Colin Powell had served in the conflict and represented the most cautious strain of Republican foreign policy. Among the current president's advisers there is Richard Holbrooke, the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who was a Foreign Service officer in Saigon, and National Security Adviser Jim Jones, who served as a platoon and company commander in Vietnam. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was an Air Force intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, though he was not stationed there. And, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could not serve in Vietnam, her opposition to the war caused her break with her Republican roots.
Perhaps the most important personal Vietnam legacy belongs to the man who almost had Clinton's job: Sen. John Kerry, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a decorated Vietnam veteran who spoke out against the war upon his return from combat. Kerry has been holding a series of hearings questioning the underpinnings of American strategy in Afghanistan. At the outset of one, he departed from his prepared remarks to describe his own past:
I recall full well in 1964 and 1965 being one of those troops who responded to the call to augment our presence in Vietnam, and there was this constant refrain from President Johnson and from General Westmoreland, you know, 'Give us more troops. We just need X more and we'll get the job done.' But, in fact, some of the core assumptions were not being examined about the domino theory, about the nature of the civil war and the structure.
Kerry is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, and Holbrooke, too, knows well what happens when a war goes awry. A recent profile in The New Yorker reports a 1967 memo Holbrooke wrote as a State Department staffer under Johnson, arguing the war was a lost cause that could only be ended with massive escalation or a policy of de-escalation, Vietnamization, and negotiation. Holbrooke now struggles not to fall into his old bosses' bad habits.
For our current president, who explicitly promised to leave behind the tumultuous political legacy of the 1960s and was only 14 years old when the Vietnam War ended, the Afghanistan/Vietnam comparison means additional headaches. He is already likened to Johnson, who decided that domestic success was worth delaying hard decisions on Vietnam and lost his presidency as a result. Obama, facing an enormous economic crisis and launching a transformative domestic-policy agenda, loathes the idea of a political battle within his party about an inherited war but is determined not to repeat Johnson's mistake...