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