Afghanistan: President Obama’s Vietnam

By Jonathan Marshall, Consortium News

25 July 16

 

President Obama is keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting an unwinnable war for fear of the political consequences if he faces reality and admits defeat, an echo of Vietnam, writes Jonathan Marshall.

istorians still debate whether President John F. Kennedy would have withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam had he lived to win re-election in 1964. Since President Barack Obama recently announced his intention to keep at least 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan through the end of his presidency, the only debate will be over why he never withdrew but chose instead to bequeath an unwinnable war — the longest in U.S. history — to his successor.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan will officially pass the 15-year mark in a few months. But like Vietnam, where the United States began aiding French colonial forces in the late 1940s, Afghanistan has been the target of Washington’s war-making for more than three-and-a-half decades.

On July 3, 1979, President Carter first authorized the secret provision of aid to armed opponents of the leftist regime in Kabul. A senior Pentagon official advocated the aid to “suck the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”

When Moscow took the bait and sent troops that December to support the Afghan government against a growing rural insurgency, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gleefully wrote President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Call it blowback, or just an irony of history, but Afghanistan has turned instead into America’s second Vietnam War. The Soviets finally had the good sense to pull out after being bloodied for a decade. The Obama administration envisions staying there indefinitely. Under the Bilateral Security Agreement that President Obama got Kabul to sign in 2014, U.S. troops may remain in Afghanistan “until the end of 2024 and beyond.”

President Obama explicitly rejected any analogy to Vietnam in a speech nearly seven years ago. But like Vietnam, our ongoing conflict in Afghanistan has become a hopeless quagmire, marked by official lies, atrocities, pervasive corruption and poorly led government forces who survive in the field thanks mainly to U.S. bombing. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan represents a staggering waste of lives (more than 300,000 direct casualties through early 2015) and resources (more than two trillion dollars).

Even more than Vietnam, it is a conflict for which no one in Washington bothers to offer any strategic rationale. The best that President Obama could come up with in his July 6 statement on Afghanistan, was “I strongly believe that it is in our national security interest — especially after all the blood and treasure we’ve invested in Afghanistan over the years — that we give our Afghan partners the very best opportunity to succeed.”

The same logic is what keeps gamblers coming back to Sheldon Adelson’s casinos year after year to lose more money.

‘Precarious’ or Unwinnable?

In Vietnam, the United States couldn’t win with more than half a million troops. In Afghanistan, the United States couldn’t beat the Taliban with 100,000 troops. Obama doesn’t really think he can win with a mere 8,400 troops — especially with the Taliban making steady gains.

“The security situation remains precarious,” he admitted. “Even as they improve, Afghan security forces are still not as strong as they need to be. The Taliban remains a threat. They’ve gained ground in some cases.”

As in Vietnam, however, ambitious military officers and armchair civilian warriors claim confidently that victory requires just a modest degree of escalation. Sounding just like Vietnam-era hawks, Retired Gen. David Petraeus and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings — previously a cheerleader for invading Iraq — accused the administration of making “U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan operate with one hand tied behind their backs.” To win the war, they declared, “We should unleash our airpower in support of our Afghan partners.”

In Indochina, of course, all of our furious bombing, which unleashed three times the tonnage dropped in World War II, only hardened enemy resistance. Recent studies confirm that the bombing was ineffective and drove civilians into the arms of the Viet Cong, just as U.S. bombs, drones and night raids build support for the Taliban.

President Richard Nixon knew it at the time, though he insisted publicly that American bombing was “very, very effective.” As he wrote despairingly in a note to Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, “We have had 10 years of total control of the air in Laos and V.Nam. The result = Zilch. There is something wrong with the strategy or the Air Force.”

Massive bombing could not make up for the unwillingness of South Vietnamese troops to risk their lives for corrupt leaders. As in Vietnam, which became known as the “dirty war,” Afghan officials have pocketed tens of billions of dollars earmarked for infrastructure and institution building. They also encourage rampant trafficking in opium and heroin, as do the Taliban.

The Taliban, however, use their profits to finance their insurgency, rather than siphoning them off to Dubai, where the families of leading Afghan officials maintain fat bank accounts and luxury villas.

Much of Afghanistan’s army consists of “ghost” soldiers and officers, who draw pay that enriches corrupt Army leaders. In some provinces, nearly half of all police are ghost employees as well.

Meanwhile, real soldiers are busy selling tens of thousands of U.S. weapons to the Taliban. Others fire their weapons at no one in particular so they can sell copper ammunition casings on the black market.

Pakistani Bases

Highly motivated Taliban forces are particularly tough to beat because they get refreshed and resupplied from bases in Pakistan, where their leaders reside. One of the key lessons of the Vietnam War was the near impossibility of defeating a determined insurgency that enjoys neighboring sanctuaries.

In Vietnam, at least, U.S. leaders pursued negotiations with the enemy to end the conflict. In Afghanistan, no one is sitting at the peace table, and the U.S. drone strike that killed Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in May was hardly a welcoming invitation from Washington.

Pakistan blames Afghanistan for the failure of the peace process to go anywhere. A spokeswoman for the Pakistani government cited the “absence of a national consensus in support of the reconciliation process,” as well as the “worsening security situation, corruption and other administrative problems.”

The Taliban and their unyielding allies are to blame as well. In June, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of one militant Islamist faction, demanded that the Kabul government send all foreign troops home and disband itself. Ironically, he was America’s (and Pakistan’s) primary ally during the war against the Soviet Union, despite (or because of) his reputation for pathological brutality and leadership of Afghanistan’s drug trade. So much for grateful allies.

So why doesn’t Obama just get out? That worked in Vietnam, which Washington today is courting as an ally. But like many CEOs today, Presidents think far more about the immediate future than about outcomes long after they leave office.

Again, Vietnam is instructive. President Lyndon Johnson heard plenty of warnings that the war was unwinnable, but remembered all too well how Republicans clobbered the Truman administration after the “fall” of China. As LBJ told Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in late 1963, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

Similarly, President Nixon — who built his career in Congress by playing the anti-communist card to the hilt — said he was not going to be “the first President of the United States to lose a war.”

President Obama knows full well that the Republican attack machine will go after him and other Democrats if he “loses” Afghanistan or Iraq, despite public ambivalence about both wars. So his calculated decision to keep fighting, at minimal cost and without any real hope of winning, makes political sense.

But his policy is also cowardly and immoral. President Obama — and his current secretary of state — should recall the testimony of former Navy Lt. John Kerry before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.

Citing President Nixon’s vow not to be the first president to “lose a war,” Kerry asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

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Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on international affairs, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.”

Democratic National Convention: Fight for America's Soul Moves On to Philadelphia

By Dan Roberts, Guardian UK

24 July 16

 

In Cleveland, Republicans fuelled fears of a broken democracy. In the City of Brotherly Love, Democrats will seek to construct a convincing response

s if watching a dystopian science fiction movie, visitors to the Republican national convention in Cleveland this week were offered a glimpse of what the collapse of American democracy might look like.

Fortified versions of Soviet “Zil lanes” allowed leaders to shuttle safely between venues, behind high fences separating them from the rest of the street. Journalists too were largely walled off from the citizenry, allowed to join the elite traffic corridors but only when escorted in what felt like luxury prison vans.

Outside, expectations of civil unrest had led authorities to ban everything from tennis balls to gas masks – excepting, of course, guns, which are permitted under Ohio open-carry laws and were worn ostentatiously by a group called Bikers for Trump.

But resistance was futile. Thousands of police had flooded the city centre and were patrolling in packs of a dozen officers or more, each flashing the badge of a different local force and yet more weapons.

When a black man protesting against police shootings of African Americans climbed a small wall, holding a megaphone, two lines of cops surrounded him, pushing back onlookers to deter an unauthorised crowd forming in a sunny city centre park.

Inside the convention arena, the theme continued. Republican delegates repeatedly called for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton, chanting “lock her up” whenever the name of the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee for president came up in speeches.

Alarmed Democrats wheeled out Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, to try to counter a torrent of abuse.

“When Republicans repeatedly get on stage at their national convention and toss attack after attack at my mom,” she wrote in a plaintive letter to supporters, “calling her things I’d never say in front of my children – let alone on live TV – they’re talking about a caricature they’ve imagined, not the woman I love and respect.”

As he sought to appear more presidential, even the GOP’s nominee, Donald Trump, seemed embarrassed by the baying crowd, waving aside demands for Clinton’s incarceration with hands that encouraged the mob instead to chant “USA! USA!”

Proof that the clemency was cosmetic, though, came when New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor who, if appointed US attorney general by Trump, would be in charge of deciding whether to reopen a criminal case against Clinton over her email scandal, decided to conduct a mock trial on the floor of the convention hall.

“We must present those facts to you, a jury of her peers, both in this hall and in living rooms around our nation,” said a lawyer once known for bipartisan moderation.

Trump also has form for scoffing at due process, having been accused of “textbook racism” by the convention chair, Paul Ryan, when he claimed this summer that the judge in an ongoing case against him could not adjudicate fairly because he was of Mexican descent.

Other authoritarian incidents from the campaign trail included vowing to reintroduce torture and urging the “taking out” of terrorists’ families; promising crackdowns on press freedom; and encouraging thugs at his rallies to assault protestors.

“Knock the crap out of them, will you? Seriously,” Trump told Iowa supporters in February. “I promise you, I will pay the legal fees.”

Any hope that Trump might moderate his tone in a “pivot” toward voters in the general election was obliterated on Thursday night when he accepted the Republican nomination with a speech that went further than ever, drawing on fear of terrorism and crime to claim he alone could “restore safety” to a country on the brink.

“Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump claimed. “Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.”

The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders and former UK Independence party leader Nigel Farage could be seen parading around the secure zones for much of the week in a constant reminder that this new nationalism can increasingly be found elsewhere.

The usually cautious Washington Post editorial board was so appalled by what it called Trump’s campaign of “snarl and sneer” that it published an editorial on Friday claiming he was a unique threat to American democracy.

What Trump did bring that was unique was his skill as a showman. Throughout the convention, relatives and business associates lined up to regale the audience with tales of the nominee’s financial acumen. Yet none mentioned the venture that made him most famous and was put to most use: his hit TV show, The Apprentice.

As the host strolled onstage to the theme from the movie Air Force One, it was clear that all those theatrical rallies on the primary trail had been mere rehearsals.

Resistance was futile. Though most big-name Republican leaders stayed away, Trump’s closest rival, Ted Cruz, followed a failed putsch by giving a speech suggesting the party should vote “with its conscience” rather than blindly back its nominee.

Some suspected that Cruz was playing a long game, looking to position himself to try again in 2020. But the violence of the reaction against him made clear Trump supporters were not to be taken lightly. Cruz’s wife had to be escorted from the convention hall by security guards. Aides warned his career was over.

“There’s no upside. I can’t see the political expediency here,” Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, told reporters the next morning. “It’s a raw political moment in our party.”

Even Cruz’s supporters made clear that questioning Trump was no longer acceptable at the Republican convention.

“I’m very angry at him not keeping his promise to back the eventual nominee,” said one Texas delegate sent to Cleveland to vote for Cruz.

“We’ll remember this for a long time,” added another, from California.

‘The rest of the country doesn’t hate Hillary like they do’

Now, the focus of resistance shifts to another city. Similar tight security awaits in Philadelphia, where the Democratic party starts its convention on Monday, but the mood is likely to be very different. Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton will join an all-star lineup of Washington A-listers trying to deal with the threat from Trump.

The ferocious attacks on Clinton might be uncomfortable to watch, but if anything they are the least of the party’s worries, serving to unify Democrats and alienate independents, according to political strategists.

“Unfortunately for the rabid Republicans, the rest of the country doesn’t hate Hillary like they do,” said Katie Packer, a Washington consultant who was a deputy campaign manager for the GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney. “They don’t know that because they only watch Fox News and mostly interact with people who think like them.”

Under this thesis, those Republicans holding their noses over Trump are deluding themselves in thinking a highly personalised campaign against Clinton will succeed in overcoming their own party negatives.

“There are a lot of people who are falling in line and don’t feel comfortable with it and the only thing they reassure themselves with is, ‘Well, he’s better than Hillary,’ which is not a winning message,” Packer said.

Moderates “aren’t excited by [Clinton] and they don’t really trust her”, she added, “but they don’t hate her, so the message that he is better than Hillary isn’t compelling enough to win elections.”

According to Democratic strategists, a bigger dilemma is how to respond to Trump’s increasingly overt nationalism and economic populism.

By whipping up fears not only of immigrants but also terrorists, criminals and anyone who protests against police brutality, the Republican nominee is potentially well-positioned in a world where all of these seem to be on the rise.

Similarly, by staking out an aggressive stance against Wall Street and supposedly job-killing foreign trade deals, Trump could also outflank Clinton on the left, in a time of deep economic insecurity.

Progressives in the Democratic party would like to see Clinton follow her primary rival Bernie Sanders down a similar road, but she signalled the opposite this weekend by appointing the centrist Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her vice-presidential running mate, rather than the more fiery Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.

“As we saw in Donald Trump’s speech last night, Republicans will run hard against Democrats on trade this year,” said Stephanie Taylor, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who believes the VP decision is a mistake.

“Unfortunately, since Tim Kaine voted to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Republicans now have a new opening to attack Democrats on this economic populist issue. The mood of the country is a populist one. The center of gravity in the Democratic party has shifted in a bold, populist, progressive direction – regardless of who is selected by Hillary Clinton as vice-president.”

Many disaffected Republicans, meanwhile, believe demographic changes mean that millennial voters are also up for grabs in the centre of the political spectrum.

“We might be watching the funeral of the Republican party at this convention,” said Richard Tafel, founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group that advocates for gay rights in a party still slowly coming around to the idea.

“There is an opportunity for a new centre-right opening up,” he added.

Another strategic question that Democrats will be grappling with in Philadelphia is how to deal with Trump’s authoritarian bombast.

The initial temptation has been to take the celebrity billionaire at his word. Early campaign messaging by Clinton focused on what many saw as the devastating consequences of his promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants or ban Muslims from entering the US.

But as Trump’s reputation for playing fast and loose with policy leads him toward ever more outlandish claims, some Clinton strategists are beginning to wonder whether taking him too seriously is a mistake. Pointing out how unrealistic his policies are may be less risky than countenancing them.

A sign of the fantasy land that Trump increasingly inhabits came on Friday, when he responded to Cruz’s resistance by dredging up – again – widely debunked rumors that the Texas senator’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

Trump appears more vulnerable to ridicule than outrage. The lowest moment in his convention week came when his wife Melania Trump was shown to have given a speech that plagiarised parts of a 2008 address by Michelle Obama. And perhaps his swiftest, and only recent, campaign U-turn came when his team unveiled its appointment of Indiana governor Mike Pence as vice-presidential candidate, only to have the internet guffawing at the inadvertently phallic logo.

Nonetheless, the sight of yet more terrorist atrocities in Europe this weekend has left no one in the mood for jokes. Clinton’s VP rollout was delayed until it was lost in the weekend news desert. Trump appeared more polished than when he responded to the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando with braggadocious tweets.

The fear is that many more such attacks, particularly in the US, could leave the most unlikely presidential candidate in the country’s history in prime position to capitalise. If November’s election favours an authoritarian backlash, the temporary police state on show in Cleveland this week could be just the start.