View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Calhoun, Institutional Archive of the Naval Postgraduate School Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive Faculty and Researcher Publications Faculty and Researcher Publications 2009 Refighting the Last War Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template Johnson, Thomas H. http://hdl.handle.net/10945/38340 T IS AN oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, Thomas H. Johnson Ithe United States has refought its last war. A number of analysts and and M. Chris Mason journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in connection with Afghanistan.1 Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed away from it. They should not—the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template. For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of Thomas H. Johnson is a research the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events professor for the Department of Na- 50 years ago is deeply disturbing. tional Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict The Obama Administration deliberately took ownership of the Afghani- Studies at the Naval Postgraduate stan war in its first days in office by sending more troops and ordering School in Monterey, CA. multiple strategic reviews. In October, as this article is being written, the M. Chris Mason is a retired Foreign Obama Administration is engaged in a very public strategic review fol- Service officer who served in 2005 as lowing both a grim assessment from the President’s hand picked theatre political officer for the PRT in Paktika and presently is a senior fellow at the commander, General Stanley McChrystal, and an embarrassing election Program for Culture and Conflict Stud- fiasco in Afghanistan. President Obama certainly knows, as Presidents ies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, DC. Johnson and Nixon did in similar circumstances, that the choice of alter- natives now is between bad and worse. There is general agreement today, _____________ as indeed there was before the Diem Coup in 1963, that the war is going PHOTOS: My Tho, Vietnam, 5 April badly. Attacks of all types in Afghanistan have increased each year since 1968. (NARA) 2003 and are up dramatically in 2009, the deadliest year yet for American A Soldier covers an injured comrade as a helicopter lands to evacuate the forces. The Kabul government is so corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent wounded after their armored vehicle that even its election rigging is buffoonish. The U.S. troop commitment hit an improvised explosive device has escalated steadily, a pattern familiar from the Vietnam War, and now in the Tangi Valley of Afghanistan’s Wardak Province, 19 August 2009. the President must contemplate a request for another 40,000 U.S. troops or, (AP Photo, David Goldman) in the words of General McChrystal’s classified assessment leaked to the 2 November-December 2009 MILITARY REVIEW THE VIETNAM TEMPLATE Cam Rahn Bay, no Mekong Delta, and no coastline, largely limiting the huge advantage of U.S. naval power to SEALs and Seabees. As in most rural peasant insurgencies, in both cases, poorly equipped guerrillas lived and hid among the people. Neither the Viet Cong (VC) nor the Taliban were or are popular. Support for either to be the national rulers was and is below 15 percent.3 In both wars the enemy deeply infiltrated our bases, and forced interpreters to inform them of our every move and word.4 In both countries, heavy-handed and culturally offensive U.S. troop U.S. Army U.S. behavior and indiscriminate use of fire support A CH-47 Chinook helicopter lifts off a slingload of ammuni- turned rural villages into enemy recruiting centers. tion from fire support baseM yron in Cambodia, 24 June 1970. North Vietnam received money, weapons and sup- Washington Post, face “mission failure.”2 What- port from the Soviet Union; the Taliban receives ever the outcomes of the President’s decision and it from the Pakistani Army (the ISI) and wealthy the current Afghan election in the next few weeks, Saudis. In June 2009, the U.S. Army even rein- however, they will not affect the extraordinary stituted the “body count” as a metric of success.5 similarity of the two conflicts. (General McChrystal revoked this on taking com- The superficial parallels between the Afghanistan mand, but the mentality remains.) and Vietnam conflicts are eerie enough. Both insur- Those are just a few of the surface symmetries. gencies were and are rurally based. In both cases, The real parallels are far more profound. There 80 percent of the population was and is rural, with are differences, to be sure, but most, if exam- national literacy hovering around 10 percent. Both ined, are more atmospheric than structural. And insurgencies were and are ethnically cohesive and unfortunately, most are distinct disadvantages exclusive. In both cases, the insurgents enjoyed for the United States. Afghanistan is a patchwork safe sanctuary behind a long, rugged and unclose- of ethnic groups, unlike Vietnam, with almost able border, which conventional U.S. forces could no national sense of identity or nationalism. In not and cannot cross, where the enemy had and has Vietnam, the United States had complete control uncontested political power. Both countries were over the prosecution of the war; in Afghanistan, wracked by decades of European imperial aggres- the “war by coalition” is hampered by fractured sion (France, the Soviet Union), both improbably internal lines of authority and national caveats and won their David-versus-Goliath wars against the rules of engagement that undermine unity of com- invaders, and both experienced a decade of North- mand. In Vietnam, the enemy was monolithic; the South civil war afterwards: all producing genera- insurgency in Afghanistan is a complex network tions of experienced and highly skilled fighters and of networks, and that is bad news.6 Afghanistan is combat commanders. not one insurgency but several connected ones, and Both countries have spectacularly inhospitable generalizations about U.S. enemies in Afghanistan and impassable terrain and few roads, limiting the are misleading and often counterproductive. value of U.S. superiority in motor vehicles and It is here, in the nature of the enemy, that the making tanks irrelevant and artillery immobile. similarities begin to become far more troubling, not Such terrain forces a reliance on airpower for fire in their motivations, which are clearly different, but support and helicopters for personnel movement in our persistent institutional misreading of their and resupply. Both wars are on the Asian landmass, motivations. In Vietnam, an intense and pervasive thousands of miles from the United States, which narrative of nationalism and reunification motivated requires super-attenuated logistics lines, although in the enemy, but the United States obtusely insisted Afghanistan, unlike Vietnam, where the U.S. Navy on casting the war as a fight against the spread of performed extremely well, there is of course no communism. However, the North Vietnamese Army MILITARY REVIEW November-December 2009 3 (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) were not fighting first of these is the political problem oflegitimacy . for communism. They were fighting for Vietnam. Indeed, the greatest challenge from North Vietnam We were fighting against communism, but the enemy then, and the Taliban today, is not combat power wasn’t fighting for it. Similarly, in Afghanistan, the but legitimacy.8 enemy has created a pervasive national discourse, in this case of religious jihad. Senior U.S. and NATO The Sine Qua Non of officials, however, continue to misread the funda- Counterinsurgency: Legitimacy mental narrative of the enemy they are fighting, “Legitimacy” is a word that is being bandied determined in this case to wage a secular campaign about a lot recently in Washington. After eight against an enemy who is fighting a religious war. years, pundits, talking heads, and government offi- The motivations of many individual foot soldiers cials alike have suddenly discovered the “legitimacy are baser, of course, ranging from revenge to crimi- of governance issue.” Unfortunately, none of them nal to simply mercenary, but that is irrelevant. The seems to understand the real one. The issue is not enemy has succeeded in establishing jihad as their the moral meltdown of President Hamid Karzai pervasive, overarching narrative. Consistently over over the last six months, nor his presiding over time and space, all of their remarkably sophisticated an absurdly (and unnecessarily) rigged election, information operations uniformly hammer home nor that he is seen as illegitimate afterward by the this religious message of jihad. Virtually all Taliban majority of Afghans. The real issue is that President leaders, from senior military and political leaders Karzai was seen as illegitimate before the election. down to sub-commanders at the district level, are The political disaster in August, which the deputy mullahs.7 The implications of this have not yet sunk head of UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, in. We are fighting a counterinsurgency; the enemy Peter Galbraith, called a “train wreck,” merely is fighting a jihad. But the intersection of how insur- shifted Afghan public perception of Karzai from gencies end and how jihads end is historically nil, contempt to scorn. Afghans are famously polite; and talk of “negotiating with the Taliban” to find a western opinion polls show only what Afghans political solution, as if the Taliban were some sort of think the questioner wants to hear, as their culture unified secular political organization, is profoundly demands, not what they actually think. naive. You cannot negotiate with God’s divine will, Why does this matter to the military? Because and in Afghanistan you only seek negotiations when experts largely agree that a government seen as you’re losing in order to get better surrender terms.