Monday, July 12, 2021

The Lesson of Afghanistan is the Lesson of Vietnam We Forgot

 

            Philosopher Georg Hegel declared the only lesson of history is that we do not learn from history.


As the US prepares for the final pullout from Afghanistan and what will soon follow as the fall of the country to the Taliban an entire generation of us wonder if this is not Deja vu all over again and that what we thought we had learned from the Vietnam War proved to be a fleeting lesson.                         For those of my generation who grew up during or served in the Vietnam War a thousand images cross our mind.  A naked girl scurrying away from Napalm, the execution of Nguy n Văn Lém, American flags draped on caskets in rows,  a woman next to a dead body at Kent State University. But for many it is helicopters evacuating the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 as the city and South Vietnam fell to the Vietcong.  The domino we fought so hard to prevent from falling, costing America 58,200 lost military lives hundreds of thousands wounded, and tens of billions of dollars, fell, nonetheless.

            In college we read Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake  and supposedly learned that we never were going to win the Vietnam War with guns alone.  Napalming a nation to death was not going to win over the hearts and minds of a people from a different culture we never understood.  David Halberstram’s The Best and the Brightest pointed to the arrogance of the Kennedy Administration in failing to understand that Vietnam was more about colonial independence than it was about communism and Cold War rivalry. And the Pentagon Papers documented the mistakes, misinformation, and lies surrounding the US involvement there, with the realization we could not win, no matter what the North Vietnamese body count was that week as announced by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.  We stayed up late at night after watching Apocalypse Now, haunted by Richard Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries accompanying helicopters at dawn attacking a village, or the appearance of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a scene after Captain Willard travels up the Nung River enroute to assignment to kill Captain Kurtz.  The message some of us took from the movie and War was that it was a seduction into evil—we as a country turned into what we most despised.US

            Supposedly we learned something from the Vietnam War about the futility of starting a battle with no clear objectives or end game.  We supposedly learned that brute force did not prevail, the need to align military power with soft power and our national interests, and that we needed to understand other cultures and history if we wished to be more successful in our foreign policy goals.  Yet by 1980 Ronald Reagan declared Vietnam a “noble cause,” suggesting memories were short, hubris tall.

            While General Colin Powell’s doctrine sought to reteach the lessons of Vietnam as we prepared for the first Gulf War in 1900-1991, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.  Merely seven days after 9/11 Congress issues the Authorization to Use Military Force, giving President Bush  as much carte blanche authority to use military force against the Taliban and Afghanistan as did the Gulf of Tonkin did for Lyndon Johnson.  We sent in the Marines and bombers and took Kabul quickly.  Soon after that lies about weapons of mass destruction took us into Iraq, and soon we were in Bagdad with another resolution and capitulation to presidential lies.   In both cases America reacted reflexively with military solutions, with no game plans for goals and objectives, what constituted victory, and no idea about the culture and people of these countries.  We repeated the arrogance of Vietnam, thinking somehow we could turn them into western democracies, and make those people like us.  All while bombing their villages and killing their people.

            Now as America is ready to leave Afghanistan after 20 years and the media pundits screech that we are abandoning our allies and simply giving up as cowards, these reflections miss the deeper meaning of this war.  We should have never been there to start with.  We made the wrong choices in 2001, and like Vietnam even after we knew it was a lost cost we stayed on, hoping that one more military surge would be the “light at the end of the tunnel” that would finally win the war.  I have no idea what we should do, but I do know that we should have learned from Vietnam that what we did in 2001 and are doing now is wrong and that it was never going to work.

            To appease critics Biden has said that we will evacuate those in Afghanistan who assisted us.  Already I can see the helicopters at the US embassy in Kabul.

            Karl Marx once declared: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”  Vietnam was the tragedy, Afghanistan the farce.

2 comments:

  1. As one who remembers those images as they occurred, I agree.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have three comments.

    #1. When President George W. Bush said, “Nation building takes a long time.” I laughed, what a fool, nation building takes FOREVER. The three countries we have successfully nation-built: Germany, Japan, and South Korea, after 80 years still have 120,000 United States military troops occupying them. I see no sign of a mission-accomplished ceremony in any of the three countries and a withdrawal any time soon.


    #2. There is a lot of talk about the blood and treasure. The people who make those arguments are stupid and ignorant of fundamental accounting practice. You have fixed costs and you have incremental costs. We as a nation spend in excess of $600 billion a year on a 1.25 million man military, ships, planes, and nuclear bombs. How much less will we spend after we withdraw from Afghanistan? Not much I bet. The incremental costs, and there are some, to keep troops overseas is miniscule in comparison to the total (fixed) costs of building, training, and maintaining our military system.

    Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance almost 50 years ago in which he described the blending between different cultures. The United States troops stationed in these countries, even without interaction or only minimum interaction with the populations, still act as role models and influence the youth of the country. But it is generational, twenty years is hardly a start. They are the antithesis of the Ugly American of the 50’s and 60’s by showing courage, discipline, hard work, and all the other attributes of Systemic White Racism. (See Judith Katz’s https://www.cascadia.edu/discover/about/diversity/documents/Some%20Aspects%20and%20Assumptions%20of%20White%20Culture%20in%20the%20United%20States.pdf)


    #3. Your Marx quote should be, “President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was a tragedy. It led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the rise and fall of that JV ISIS group, and turmoil and anarchy through out the mid-east. President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 is a farce and will continue Obama’s disastrous legacy.


    Maybe the day will come when this is President Biden, then again maybe not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__6Qb2rgzuo

    ReplyDelete