Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Cambodia: Sharing Experiences of US Wars

Learning from the End of Illusions

Monday, September 13, 5 p.m.

Youtube video available here

Many of us who were alive on April 29, 1975 will remember what became an iconic photograph of frenetic people lining up desperately hoping to be evacuated by helicopter from a roof in Saigon to an American aircraft carrier cruising off the coast. The helicopter lift that day and the next became symbolic of America’s catastrophic war in Vietnam. Mainstream media have resurrected Hugh van Es’s famous photograph to suggest parallels between those April days in 1975 and what is now happening in Afghanistan. In fact, President Biden himself recently used that scene to assure Americans that the end of U.S. military activity in Afghanistan bore no relationship to the end in Vietnam. Perhaps.

However one reads the pictures from Saigon and Kabul, the issue we need to confront is not how the Americans and their allies flew off but how we got into the quagmire, first in Vietnam, then—apparently having learned little or nothing--in Afghanistan. What is it in American culture and politics, in American foreign and military policy, that again and again leads the nation into the big muddy? Is there something particularly American in this history or more a story of big power chauvinism? In any case, what is it that induces American politicians and generals to make decisions that leave the U.S. as well as the countries we would “save” worse off than when our interventions began? Why do American leaders apparently believe that the US can—and should—use its many guns and much money to reshape other countries? What do answers to such questions tell us about our country, its institutions, civil and military, and about the culture of our democracy itself?

Needless to say, the cases of Vietnam and Afghanistan are not identical. For example, the National Liberation Front and the Taliban could hardly be more different in history, culture, religion, policies toward women, and the like. Nor are the reasons Americans went in to begin with alike. Nevertheless, here we are, once again, in the morass. This webinar is designed to explore why, and how, in light of Vietnam and Afghanistan, future policies must be changed. And to consider the implications of what President Biden said in his speech on the subject, criticizing as a “mistake” the attempt “to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces.” Mistaken, malevolent, uninformed, silly—we need to reconsider the last half century of American interventions as we face an increasingly conflicted future.

Speakers

H. Bruce Franklin is a former Air Force navigator and intelligence officer, a progressive activist for six decades, and author or editor of twenty books. He has won the highest awards in fields as diverse as prison literature, science fiction, and marine ecology, and the lifetime achievement award from the American Studies Association. For his latest work on the Vietnam War and the Forever War, see his home page: hbrucefranklin.com.

Doug Hostetter is a Mennonite scholar, writer and peace activist. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War who chose to do his alternative service working for Mennonite Central Committee in Tam Ky, Vietnam, from 1966 - 1969. During his time in Vietnam, Doug established a literacy program which used Vietnamese high school students to teach thousands of Vietnamese children, whose schools had been destroyed by the US military, how to read and write. Doug was a specialist for Peace at the United Methodist Office for the United Nations, was the Director of the New England Office of the American Friends Service Committee, the Director of the US Fellowship of Reconciliation and directed the Mennonite Central Committee United Nations Office for over a decade. Doug did two short term assignments delivering humanitarian aid to Afghanistan for the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee in October/November 2001 and July/Agust of 2002. Doug is currently a member of the Pax Christi International Advocacy Team at the United Nations. Doug has published widely on the issues of war, peace and nonviolence, and is a contributing author to The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar movement.

Arnold R. Isaacs is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, named a Notable Book of the Year by both the New York Times and the American Library Association. He also wrote Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy and an online report, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in Post-9/11 America, available at www.fromtroubledlands.net. Isaacs was formerly a reporter, foreign and national correspondent, and editor for the Baltimore Sun. During six years as the Sun's correspondent in Asia, among other major stories he covered the closing years and final days of the Vietnam war. Since leaving daily journalism he has taught or conducted training programs for journalists and journalism students in more than 20 countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net

Laura Jedeed is a writer, journalist, and Afghanistan war veteran based in New York City. She joined the US Army at 18 out of belief that the Global War on Terror would keep America safe and bring freedom and democracy to people overseas who wanted it. Her subsequent two deployments disabused her of that notion, and she now advocates for an end to colonialist projects and the ideas that lead to them. laurajedeed.com laura.jedeed@gmail.com Twitter @laurajedeed

Ben Kiernan is the A.Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University. He was founding Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program (gsp.yale.edu) from 1994-2015, and has chaired Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies. His books include How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985); The Pol Pot Regime (1996); Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2007); Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007); and Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (2017). Kiernan’s work has appeared in twelve languages, and is featured in Southeast Asia: Essential Readings, and in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide.

Blood and Soil won the Independent Publishers’ 2008 gold medal for the best work of history, and the 2009 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize for the best book dealing with the Holocaust in its broadest context. Its German translation was Nonfiction Book of the Month. Kiernan received the 2002 Critical Asian Studies Prize for his anthology Conflict and Change in Cambodia, and a 2018 “Inspiring Yale Award” in the Yale School of Graduate Studies.

For three decades, Kiernan documented the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime. Under his direction, Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program established the Documentation Center of Cambodia, uncovered the archives of the Khmer Rouge secret police, detailed the case for an international tribunal, and won multiple internet awards.

Moderator Paul Lauter is A. K. and G. M. Smith Professor of Literature Emeritus at Trinity College. He is the author, most recently, of Our Sixties: An Activist’s History. Lauter served as president of the American Studies Association (USA) and has spoken and consulted at universities in almost every state and in 25 countries. Earlier in his career, he worked for the American Friends Service Committee, ran a community school in Washington, DC, helped found The Feminist Press, directed the US Servicemen’s Fund, and was active in a variety of Movement organizations.

Our webinars are free to watch, but not to produce. Make tax deductible contributions to cover costs here.

Resources

"How the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan can help the US face China"

October 01, 2021 Charles Dunst, Eurasia Group GZero

Journalist Arnold Isaacs compares the End of the Vietnam War with Afghanistan

Read it here

"The media is lambasting Biden over Afghanistan. He should stand firm"

by Bhaskar Sunkara, The Guardian

"Afghan exit is a low moment for journalism"

by Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer

"What America Owes Afghanistan and Vietnam War Victims"

by Viet Thanh Nguyen The New York Times

"Taliban’s religious ideology – Deobandi Islam – has roots in colonial India"

by Sohel Rana and Sumit Ganguly, The Conversation

"From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project"
by Greg Jaffe, The Washington Post

"The Return of the Taliban"

By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

"AFGHANISTAN ALTERNATIVE"

by Doug Hostetter, Anabaptist World, page 8

"Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation"

by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, annebonnypirate.org

"September 11 and the Debacle of 'Nation-Building' in Iraq and Afghanistan

Nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq was the resurrection of a doctrine that should have been buried after Vietnam."

by Walden Bello

https://portside.org/2021-09-18/september-11-and-debacle-nation-building-iraq-and-afghanistan

"Can the Foreign Policy Elites Survive Biden's Rejection?"

The president's Afghanistan withdrawal has pushed the nation-builders to the margins. But the 'Blob' always finds a way to adapt.

by JACK SHAFER

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/14/biden-afghanistan-foreign-policy-blob-511673

Webinar on Women and the Draft

The Future of Selective Service

September 27, 2021 4:30 - 6:00 p.m. ET

Watch the youtube video here https://youtu.be/bLs7gdA29Wo

Resistance to the draft was a major factor in the movement against the US war in Indochina as dramatized in the recent documentary film, "The Boys Who Said NO!".

The Senate Armed Services Committee has proposed amending the Selective Service law to require registration of women in addition to men. There will be coverage about this issue in the media this fall and debates in both the House and Senate.

Traditionalists oppose including women in the draft. Peace activists see this as an opportunity to eliminate or suspend an entire dysfunctional system of required registration. Others believe as long as Selective Service exists and is registering men, equal treatment of women in the military and society means they should also register. Feminists who reject war and militarism as linked to patriarchy oppose inclusion of women in the draft.

Critics of an All Volunteer Force decry an economic draft that puts the burden of repeated military postings on a narrow sector of US society and encourages Congressional irresponsibility and public indifference to forever wars. A less discussed approach so far is creation of universal national service offering both civilian and military paths.

Our webinar will provide insight from different perspectives about how to engage in a vital national debate.

Speakers

As one of only 20 people to have been prosecuted for resistance to themilitary draft since the end of the U.S. war in Indochina, Edward Hasbrouck "served" 4 ½ months in a Federal prison camp in 1983-1984 for refusing to register with the Selective Service System. In 2019, he was the only draft resister invited to testify before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. He is a member of the War Resisters League and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, and is active in movements for peace, human rights, and youth liberation. His web site https://hasbrouck.org/draft/ is the most comprehensive resource about the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance in the U.S. since 1980.

Robert Levering is an Executive Producer and Advisor to the Boys Who Said NO! a recently completed film about draft resistance during the Vietnam era. (boyswhosaidno.com) He is currently working on a documentary entitled The Movement and the Madman about the impact of the 1969 Moratorium and Mobilization demonstrations in preventing Nixon from escalating the war (movementandthemadman.com) A draft resister himself, Robert was a full-time antiwar organizer for six years during the Vietnam War. A long-time journalist, he wrote an article on the current controversy about registering women for the draft: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2020/05/activists-fought-military-draft-conscription-congress-women-register/

Author/Activist Rivera Sun (CODEPINK) has written many books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence NewsÂ and serves on the Advisory Board of World Beyond War. Rivera is the program coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and the Nonviolent Cities Project. Her articles on peace and nonviolence have appeared in journals nationwide. www.riverasun.com

Kara Dixon Vuic is the LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in Twentieth-Century America at Texas Christian University and the author of The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Harvard University Press, 2019), which won the Tonous and Warda Johns Family Book Award from the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch.

Her first book, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), won the Lavinia L. Dock Book Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing, was named a Book of the Year in History and Public Policy by the American Journal of Nursing, and was a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award.

She also edited The Routledge Handbook on Gender, War, and the U.S. Military (2017) and is co-editor (with Richard Fogarty) of the University of Nebraska Press’s book series “Studies in War, Society, and the Military.” She co-edited the forthcoming collection Managing Sex in the U.S. Military (University of Nebraska Press) and is writing a new book called “Drafting Women.”

For the last fifteen years, Lawrence Wilkerson was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. In December 2020 he retired from that position. Before his professorship he was chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell at the U.S. Department of State. He served 31 years in the US Army retiring with the rank of Colonel. His final military assignments were Special Assistant to then-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell and, later, Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia. Today he is a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder with Major General Dennis Laich (Ret)) of the All-Volunteer Force Forum.

Moderator John McAuliff is the executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development and coordinator of the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee. As a student at Carleton College, he organized support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and participation in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. After serving in the Peace Corps in Peru, he became the first President of the Committee of Returned Volunteers, leading its participation in the Vietnam anti-war movement, including the demonstration at the Chicago Democratic Convention. He represented CRV in national anti-war coalitions and the U.S coalition at international conferences in Sweden. For ten years he directed the Indochina Program in the Peace Education Division of the American Friends Service Committee, traveling on its behalf to Hanoi with a delegation from the Indochina Peace Campaign that arrived on April 30, 1975, the last day of the war. In 1985 he founded the Fund for Reconciliation and Development to continue his AFSC work for normalization of relations with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After that was accomplished in 2005, he refocused most of his work on a similar goal with Cuba. He was "detained" at the March on the Pentagon and the Mayday civil disobedience action and while demonstrating against George Wallace during his Presidential campaign in New York.

Resources

Debate on extending registration to women in the House Armed Services Committee:

https://youtu.be/M6lzE5bIyVQ?t=9253

Roll-call vote:

https://youtu.be/M6lzE5bIyVQ?t=11590

"Registering women for the draft wouldn’t be a big departure from the past"

By Kara Dixon Vuic, Washington Post

"Expanding the Military Draft Is Not Feminism. Abolishing Draft

Registration Is." by Danaka Katovich Truthout

"A Feminist Take on the Selective Service" (white paper by Women's Action

for New Directions, formerly Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament):

"Women in Combat? Let’s Reframe the Debate"