In today’s 140-character smartphone society, oversimplifying U.S. involvement in Afghanistan with the tired “new Vietnam” trope, satisfies people with a catchphrase that doesn’t require much additional thought. On the surface, both were counterinsurgency commitments that went on forever without decisive victory. Constructs like these, however, divert objective thinking away from similarities that run much deeper and are far more troubling. Equating Afghanistan to a war that took place over half a century ago is a meaningless argument that will be dismissed and ignored, just as it has when used about Iraq, Bosnia, Persian Gulf, Libya, Nicaragua, and every other military action since the 80s. Hindsight is not always 20/20. It is distorted through the lens of events that followed. It also violates Einstein’s principle of not addressing problems with the same level of thinking used when they were created. While it may be true that the goals of the U.S. are unclear and the war in Afghanistan has no coherent strategy, presenting it as Vietnam increases the possibility of the predetermined outcome — failure. Policymakers are then more likely to confront the situation as it seems to be, rather than the reality of what it is. History can be especially important to guide us from future mistakes, but when it is used by nation-states as a strategic roadmap, actors may become trapped in a thought process that overlooks contextual information. This paper examines the popular Vietnam/Afghanistan analogy in recognizing the important differences that make the use of such fallacies to legitimize action so dangerous and costly.
Entry
Officially, the Vietnam war happened from 1962–1972, but the foreign policy underlying American involvement was shaped in 1947 by the Truman Doctrine and establishment of the CIA. It held that communism, if not contained, would expand its global reach, jumping from one nation to its neighbors. On the surface, this was the pretext used to legitimize US entry into the second Indochina War. Beneath the politics, however, lie the profits. Driven by economic interests, French colonialism in Vietnam had been going on for more than six decades. They were profiting billions on rice wine, salt, opium, rubber, and tin. Following the Japanese surrender in mid-August 1945, Vietnam nationalist Ho Chi Minh took back control of Hanoi, Haiphong, Saigon, and other cities which had been under Japanese and French colonial rule. (Worthing, 1997) Over the next five months, Ho wrote eight letters to President Harry Truman begging for U.S. support and recognition of the full independence of Vietnam by the U.N. Truman ignored him. According to Pulitzer Prize winner Fredrik Logevall, “[the war] had little to do with Vietnam herself — it was all about American priorities on the world stage. France had made her intentions clear, and the administration did not dare defy a European ally that it deemed crucial to world order, for the mere sake of honoring the principles of the Atlantic Charter.” (Logevall, 2012) When it became apparent in 1959 that US-backed South Vietnam would not participate in the promised elections for the reunification of Vietnam, Ho and his ministers began planning to overthrow the South. This is what led the US to officially start sending troops in 1959. The espoused fear being that if Vietnam was to unite under Ho, “the dominoes would fall and a part of the world would go Communist”. (Beschloss, 1997)
In October 2001, US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan under the justification of “counterterrorism”. The bombing and invasion were presented to the public as a “just war” to eliminate Islamic terrorism and instate Western style democracy following the attacks on 9/11. But literally, below the Afghan surface, lies trillions in natural resources like; copper, iron, coal, marble, precious metals, lithium, gemstones and above all hydrocarbons, some of which have been discovered while most remains un-explored, owing to the ongoing conflict. (Khan, 2015) In addition to its vast mineral and gas reserves, Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the World’s supply of opium which is used to produce grade 4 heroin. (United States, 2018) This resource base has also been known to both Russia (Soviet Union) and China going back to the 1970s. Influential geostrategist and proxy war godfather Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out his vision for America in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’:
“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained…About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” (Brzezinski, 1997)
The United States current involvement in Afghanistan is not a war but an occupation that has been carefully planned out for decades. Eliminating the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was part of the Cold War strategy to weaken the Soviet Union. Brzezinski claimed that in 1979 Jimmy Carter signed a directive giving secret aid to anti-communist insurgents before the Soviet invasion, effectively setting a trap. (Blum, 1995) Those insurgents, the Mujahideen, defeated the Soviet Union in the 10 year proxy war that followed. One of the key players of the project was CIA asset Osama bin Laden, who was in charge of fundraising and recruitment. And in 1989, the same year that Soviet troops withdrew, he founded the terrorist organization Al Qaeda with a number of fighters he had recruited to the Mujahideen. (BBC, 2004) The US had threatened military action against Afghanistan several months prior to 9/11. The CIA had been mounting paramilitary operations in southern Afghanistan since 1997. In 2010, Washington feared “that resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth which would upset the United States”… After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more”. (Wilson, 2010) Conveniently enough, war plans were on President Bush’s desk ready to go on September 12th. Afghanistan is essentially ground zero in a profit driven resource war among superpowers.
Commitment
One of the biggest difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan is in the number of troops involved. At its height in 1969 there were an estimated 549,000 Americans involved in the Vietnam War effort. The National Archives estimated that 58,220 Americans died there. (National Archives, 2008) Back then, most Americans knew somebody who had been to Vietnam; was in Vietnam, or could go there. Today maybe 2% or 3% of the country’s population knows somebody directly involved in the war. There was also the fact that most soldiers back then were drafted, not voluntary. The cost difference is another big point. At 715 billion, Vietnam was a fraction of what we’ve spent in Afghanistan. (Daggett, 2008)
According to the latest report from the Defense Department’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the U.S. government has spent at least $132 billion on Afghanistan since 2002. (SIGAR, 2019) The current number of US forces in Afghanistan is around 9,000. President Trump’s new deployment will increase that number to around 14,000. (SIGAR, 2019) Since the beginning of U.S. operations in Afghanistan in October 2001, 2,409 U.S. military personnel have died (1,888 KIA and 520 in non-hostile circumstances) and 20,461 were WIA. (SIGAR, 2019)
Exit
Anyone who thinks the Afghanistan occupation is less popular than Vietnam does not remember or understand the latter conflict. By year 5,Vietnam had torn this country apart. In 1970, 60% of Americans opposed US involvement in the war. (Gallup, 2005) In contrast, we are on year 18 in Afghanistan and there has still never been massive protests, as we saw in the late 60s. According to a recent poll, 41 percent said they would approve of a pullout from Afghanistan versus 30 percent who disapprove. (Riechmann, & Fingerhut, 2019) Largely, policy concerning Afghanistan and the continued loss of life have failed to spark enough public outcry to influence the campaign.
The vastly different political climate of the 60s and today also makes it very difficult to compare the two wars. One potentially large factor was the fact that the public was made aware of the deeper truth behind the war. The release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 helped confirm what most Americans intuitively already knew: that the American government, both parties, knew early on that the war was unwinnable and that maintaining troop levels guaranteed more American deaths. In other words, long before the protesters ever came onto the scene, the highest-level people in the government, both civilian and military, knew the War was a fraud. They knew that the War could not be won. They knew its staggering costs, in both lives and treasure. Yet, they lied about it to continue it. That is what the Pentagon Papers were all about. And when Daniel Ellsberg leaked them to the press, his hope was that they would help end the Vietnam War, and it did. Ultimately the reason America withdrew from Vietnam was because the public concluded we could not win.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. accomplished what it sought out to do in just a few months. By December 2001, al Qaeda’s terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan was eliminated, the Taliban regime was kicked out of Kabul and little more than a broken movement, and Osama bin Laden was hiding in a cave somewhere between the Afghan-Pakistani border. Yet, rather than declare victory and come home, Washington vastly expanded the mission to unimaginable heights. The critical lesson of Vietnam is that any nation can lose a war it is not prepared to win. The difference with Afghanistan is that the US has been tactically planning and preparing this occupation for decades in advance. It is completely inaccurate to assume that we are still there 18 years later because we are “losing”. First of all, you’d have to believe that there was actually a plan to exit. This occupation may be costing the taxpayers, but there are many who are becoming extremely wealthy from it’s resources, including the US government.
In 2009 Barack Obama ended opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, effectively green lighting Afghan opium production and the Afghan heroin trade. By 2010, all US efforts to eradicate Afghan opium ceased. It has been US policy to allow Afghan opium growing and the heroin trade since. The effects in the US are that heroin deaths more than quintupled, from 3,000 to over 15,000. (Glickman & Weiner, 2019) An exhaustive study detailing the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the sprawl in production areas reads; “In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.” (UNODC, 2016) Even the SIGAR report suggests a crucial connection between US military operations and America’s heroin epidemic; “ Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Military and ex-military alike can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline — in many cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of US intel black ops that should not by any means come under scrutiny by the US Congress.”(SIGAR, 2017)
Literally more Americans have died indirectly as a result of the Afghanistan occupation than there were casualties in Vietnam. But there are no protests because there are no “Pentagon Papers”, no honest corporate-media journalists willing to report the truth, and whistleblowers like Julian Assange are being imprisoned as Americans demand he be punished for providing us with the truth. I would not consider the US mission in Afghanistan a failure at all. I believe they are successfully accomplishing what has been carefully planned out by the global elite, the CIA, and military industrial complex for years. And the danger with trying to fit this square occupation into a round war is that policymakers and those that are profiting, is that nothing would stop them from creating a threat to make it look more like a circle in order to justify their status.
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