Skip Isaacs Compares Vietnam with Afghanistan
8/28/31
Dear friends --
If you're following the news from Afghanistan, I highly recommend an essay
by Sara Chayes, at https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august, posted
just as the Taliban were taking control in Kabul. I think it's by far the best
commentary I've read on this summer's disastrous events.
If you don't already know the name, Chayes had long experience in
Afghanistan (details are in her essay), observed the war there from a remarkable
variety of vantage points over quite a few years. That background led her to
focus on the critical issue of corruption, first in wartime Afghanistan and then
elsewhere around the world, and she has written two terrific books on that
issue, Thieves of State and On Corruption in America. This piece pulls together
a lot of first-hand vignettes and reflections that combine to illuminate a lot
of the underlying realities that shaped the current collapse.
And the personal note: it may not surprise you that these events are
stirring a lot of memories from the last years and final days of the Vietnam
war, which I witnessed first-hand before flying out in the helicopter evacuation
of Saigon on April 29, 1975. A lot of the pundits who've been making that
comparison are inaccurate on many meaningful facts in that earlier story, but
the parallels are still VERY real and chilling, and the feelings they evoke then
and now seem pretty much identical.
I particularly remember the words I heard on the bridge radio of the USS
Mobile after that last flight out: "What a waste!" The guy on the radio was
talking about the helicopters and fixed-wing planes that were being dumped
overboard from U.S. ships, but when I heard his words they sounded like an
epitaph for the whole war, or maybe every war across the span of human history.
They certainly express my thoughts and feeling about Afghanistan right
now!
Consumer alert: you may receive another message fairly soon with some
further reflections on these painful events.
Best wishes and hope this finds you well and as comfortable as possible in
a troubled time...
Skip Isaacs
Author, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans and Afghan
Americans in Post-9/11 America (online at www.fromtroubledlands.net)
Website: www.arnoldisaacs.net
8/31/2
Dear friends --
Following up my earlier mailing, some more musings prompted by events in
Afghanistan...
To begin with, some arithmetic -- a couple of calculations I assume others
must have made, but that I haven't seen anywhere, a bit to my surprise. A lot of
zeroes but actually quite simple math, with revealing and troubling
answers:
Exercise 1 -- Divide 83 billion by 307,000. First figure is the dollars the
U.S. spent over 20 years directly supporting the Afghan defense forces
(equipment, training, paying for operations and salaries). The second is the
officially claimed and undoubtedly inflated number of Afghanistan's defense and
security personnel as of the beginning of this year. Do the division and the
answer, if my elderly desk calculator got it right, comes to a bit over 270,000.
That is, each alleged member of the Afghan military and police in early 2021
represented a U.S. investment of $270,000 -- more than a quarter of a million
bucks for every single soldier and cop who were supposedly there to defend the
Kabul government after U.S. troops left!
What does that say about the Americans who ran this war for 20 years but
never were smart enough to make the Afghan military an effective ally, or honest
enough to admit or even see what wasn't working? Don't those folks share the
responsibility, along with Joe Biden, for the current catastrophe?
Exercise 2 -- Divide 837 billion by 40 million. First figure is the
cumulative U.S. expenditure on warfighting (as per the Special Inspector General
for Afghanistan Reconstruction). Second is the current Afghan population,
rounded up. The answer here is 20,925. So, the amount the U.S. paid for its
failed war during these 20 years is nearly $21,000 for EVERY SINGLE MAN, WOMAN
AND CHILD now alive in that country. That's way more than the entire income of
the vast majority of Afghans during that period, by the way, especially if you
leave out those who got rich from corruptly siphoning a lot of that money into
their own pockets. Hard not to think we could have achieved a better result by
just folding up some (not all) of those dollars in envelopes and handing them
out to the population, including those subject to recruitment by the Taliban, to
bribe them onto our side? That strategy apparently worked quite well for the
Taliban this year. Again, shouldn't the policymakers who kept that war going and
the military leaders who executed that policy be held accountable, along with
the current administration, for the outcome we have seen?
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Also... the news in recent weeks has reminded me of some past writings that
feel eerily pertinent to the happenings in Afghanistan. The adjective
"prophetic" is not one I normally would apply to my work, but I have to say
that's the word that has been coming to mind as I reread some of those old
pieces.
First, along with the Vietnam echoes I wrote about in the last mailing, I'm
hearing others from the compelling stories I heard from first- and
second-generation Afghan Americans I interviewed eight or nine years ago for a
long report about the experience of the Afghan and Pakistani American
communities. It's titled From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans
and Afghan Americans in Post-9/11 America' online at fromtroubledlands.net, if
you'd like to have a look. Chapter IV, "Afghan Americans: The Heritage of
Trauma," is particularly resonant to the present topic. You can click directly
on that chapter, though of course I'd be pleased to have folks read the rest of
the piece.
Second, going back to Vietnam and specifically to the end of that war and
the evacuation of Saigon, I've been remembering an essay I wrote back in 2005,
marking the passage of 30 years since those events. If you'd like to have a
look, it's on my website at arnoldisaacs.net/Leaving_Saigon_revised.pdf. The
circumstances and logistics were different, but the experience and feelings
recorded in this piece are clearly very much like those that people in
Afghanistan are living through 46 years later.
Beyond those, for your possible interest, here are some other gleanings
from my scrapbooks:
-- From the closing chapter of my 1983 book Without Honor: Defeat in
Vietnam and Cambodia...
<<[W]hat the United States really lacked in Vietnam was not
persistence but understanding—that, and the flexibility to change policies that
had proven bankrupt. From start to finish, American leaders remained
catastrophically ignorant of Vietnamese history, culture, values, motives, and
abilities. Misperceiving both its enemy and its ally and imprisoned in the
myopic conviction that sheer military force could somehow overcome adverse
political circumstances, Washington stumbled from one failure to the next in the
continuing delusion that success was always just ahead. This ignorance and false
hope were mated, in successive administrations, with bureaucratic circumstances
that inhibited admission of error and made it always seem safer to keep
repeating the same mistakes rather than risk the unknown perils of a different
policy. The wounds of that experience were painful enough. With the war finally
over, the revisionist belief that it was lost only because of Washington's
timidity, rather than for Vietnamese reasons, was the self-infliction of still
another wound—a refusal to learn the lesson that had been so expensively
taught.>>
(Sound timely? A new edition of this book will be released sometime later
this year or early in 2022, by the way. I'm wishing I'd gotten that contract six
months or a year earlier!)
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-- A 2015 essay titled Can Corruption Lose Wars?, originally written for a
now-defunct online publication called Cicero Magazine. It's on my website
at
arnoldisaacs.net/Cicero%20archive/cicero%20corruption%20essay.htm
This one also seems to foreshadow recent events in Afghanistan. Here's a
short excerpt:
<<Corruption [in Vietnam] didn’t only anger and alienate people at
the bottom. It subverted the leadership up and down the chain of command. Those
officers and officials were not there to defeat the enemy or provide government
services, but to continue profiting from corruption. In that system there was no
place for officers and officials who wanted to fight honestly for their country,
and to earn the trust and loyalty of their soldiers and citizens. Those were
perhaps the most demoralized of all. By the time I flew out of Vietnam in a
Marine evacuation helicopter the day before the war ended, I was convinced that
corruption was the single biggest reason for that defeat. I do not have the same
first-hand knowledge of Iraq or Afghanistan, but abundant evidence leaves no
possible doubt that the dynamic in those wars is similar, and that if the
U.S.-supported war efforts in those countries fall short of their goals,
corruption will have been a major cause.>>
-0-
-- In a 2013 review essay for Military Review on books relating to Vietnam,
these paragraphs, especially the quotes from John Dower, sound pretty
prescient:
<<The historian Ronald Spector... recalled a story about the
Confederate general George Pickett’s response when he was asked why the South
lost the Civil War. “Well,†Pickett is supposed to have replied, “I kinda
think the Yankees had a little something to do with it.†The Vietnamese had
something to do with America’s failure in Vietnam, too, a truth that Americans
would have done well to remember before plunging into war in other distant,
unfamiliar places. Sadly, a mass of evidence suggests that we did not learn that
lesson well enough.
<<A good deal of that evidence can be found in Cultures of War (W.W.
Norton, New York, 2010), by the renowned historian John W. Dower. Cultures of
War is not about Vietnam, but focuses on wars before and after. It examines the
influence of cultural attitudes in two events of the U.S.-Japanese war in World
War II, Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor, and the American decision to
drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; and in two events of the war-on-terror era,
the 9/11 attack, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The parallels Dower finds in
those two eras are arresting in themselves. They also evoke unmistakable echoes
of Vietnam, even where that war is not mentioned.
<<An example is this passage from a “supporting paper†submitted
in early 2005 for a Defense Science Board report on the U.S. effort in
Iraq:
<<"To put it bluntly, [U.S. forces] never possessed an understanding
of the political and religious nature of their opponent. . . It is clear that
Americans who waged the war and who have attempted to mold the aftermath have
had no clear idea of the framework that has molded the personalities and
attitudes of Iraqis. Finally, it might help if Americans and their leaders were
to show less arrogance and more understanding of themselves and their place in
history. Perhaps more than any other people, Americans display a consistent
amnesia concerning their own past, as well as the history of those around
them."
<<Change the name of the country (and perhaps delete the word
“religiousâ€) and every other word in those sentences could have been written
about the U.S. war in Vietnam. The same is true in many other places in
Dower’s book, as where he notes the American habit of disparaging enemies from
other races and cultures. That tendency leads
Americans to chronically underestimate the people they are fighting, like
the former Navy commander at Pearl Harbor who admitted, “I never thought those
little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from
Japan.†The word “little†is as significant as the word “yellow†in
that sentence, Dower points out, connoting “not merely people of generally
shorter physical stature, but more broadly a race and culture inherently small
in capability and in the accomplishments esteemed in the white Euro-American
world.†Both the attitude and the word persist in American culture. Three
decades after Pearl Harbor, Henry Kissinger contemptuously called North Vietnam
“a miserable little country.†Three more decades after that, in a new
century, a
conservative columnist offered this policy advice: “Every ten years or
so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and
throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean
business.â€>>
[NOTE: The columnist was Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review, in
2002. That particular sentence, Goldberg added, was a paraphrase from an earlier
speech by the neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen.]
<<That arrogance has consequences. In seeing their opponents as
inferior primitives, Dower writes, Americans fail to see anything of an
enemy’s “diversity, complexity, autonomy, history, and historical
consciousness.†That leads to costly mistakes in planning and carrying out
wars. The same blindness about our friends can be even more damaging, though
military theorists and historians often overlook that point. In Vietnam,
miscalculating the qualities and capabilities of our ally almost certainly had
more to do with America’s failure than any miscalculations about the enemy.
One could probably say the same about American frustrations in Afghanistan as
well.>>
(Full text at https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20131031_art013.pdf)
-0-
-- I'll also mention a couple of pieces from 2018. One is an essay called
"Missing Voices from the Vietnam War," at http://arnoldisaacs.net/Missing_Voices_from_Vietnam.pdf.
This one, never published, recalls vivid encounters with Vietnamese villagers
who feared and hated both sides in that conflict. I am reasonably sure one would
hear just about exactly the same stories and opinions from millions of ordinary
Afghans who have lived through the war in their country.
The other 2018 piece was written for TomDispatch.com, "Why Can't the
World's Best Military Win Its Wars?" at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176417/. (A consumer
advisory on the TomDispatch piece: the text you see when you open the link is a
fairly long intro from the site editor. NOT the beginning of the article. To get
to the actual piece you have to scroll down a couple of screens to a second
headline.) When I looked again at the following paragraph from that essay, I
will shamelessly say it really did sound prophetic:
<<In Vietnam and our more recent wars, the weaknesses of
Washington’s local partners -- which U.S. officials have been stunningly
reluctant to recognize -- should be seen as the fundamental reason those wars
have been so unsuccessful despite the overwhelming advantage in material
resources that U.S. forces and their allies possessed. There's an implication
here for the American approach to intelligence (in both the narrow and broad
senses of the word). While rethinking what military power means, perhaps we
should reconsider what intelligence means, too. In particular, it would be
useful to revisit the classic premise -- stated more than 2,500 years ago by the
Chinese sage Sun Tzu -- that the first goal of intelligence is to "know your
enemy." It certainly would have been helpful in the last half-century's wars if
American commanders had known their opponents better. In Vietnam and since,
though, by far the most damaging intelligence failure wasn’t not knowing our
enemies well enough, but not knowing our friends. Consistently in these wars,
Americans have overestimated their local ally's capabilities while remaining
blind, whether purposely or not, to the grave weaknesses of those
forces.>>
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That's already more than enough self-quotation, I know, but I can't resist
adding one more, going back to the From Troubled Lands report. This one is
history, not prophecy --a reminder that the Islamic extremism our leaders and
opinion makers have been so self-righteously outraged about actually was
encouraged and supported in its early days when American cold-warriors were
helping mobilize Afghan resistance after the 1979 Soviet invasion:
<<In a bizarre twist of history that most of the Americans involved
might prefer to forget... the United States also underwrote education that
carried a violent jihadi message to Afghan refugee children. As part of its
support for the anti-Soviet resistance, the U.S. government funded the
University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies to produce
hundreds of thousands of textbooks in Pashto and Dari (Farsi), Afghanistan's two
principal languages, for use in refugee camp classrooms. The texts were full of
language and warlike images glorifying the mujahideen as heroic soldiers for
Islam. One Dari text, for example, contained this definition of jihad: "the kind
of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims and Muslim lands
from the enemies of Islam. If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every
Muslim." ... An article for World Policy Journal reproduced this excerpt from a
lesson on the Persian alphabet:
<<Alif [is for] Allah. Allah is one.
Bi [is for] Father (baba). Father goes to the mosque...
Pi [is for] Five (panj). Islam has five pillars...
Ti [is for] Rifle (tufang). Javad obtains rifles for the Mujahidin...
Jim [is for] Jihad. Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. Our
brother gave water to the Mujahidin...
Dal [is for] Religion (din). Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the
enemies of the religion of Islam...
Zhi [is for] Good news (muzhdih). The Mujahidin missiles rain down like dew
on the Russians. My brother gave me good news that the Russians in our country
taste defeat...
Shin [is for] Shakir. Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes
happy with the defeat of the Russians...
Zal [is for] Oppression (zulm). Oppression is forbidden. The Russians are
oppressors. We perform jihad against the oppressors...
Vav [is for] Nation (vatn). Our nation is Afghanistan.... The Mujahidin
made our country famous.... Our Muslim people are defeating the communists. The
Mujahidin are making our dear country free.
<<Sources: Craig Davis, "'A' Is for Allah, 'J' Is for Jihad," World
Policy Journal, Spring 2002; Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway "From U.S., the
ABC's of Jihad: Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education
Efforts," Washington Post, March 23, 2002)
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OK, enough (finally!). If you're still reading, perhaps you will have
grasped why looking back at some of those old writings as the Afghanistan war
ended made me feel icy fingers going up and down my spine.
best wishes to all
Skip Isaacs
Author, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans and Afghan
Americans in Post-9/11 America (online at www.fromtroubledlands.net)
Website: www.arnoldisaacs.net
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