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.>>


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-- 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 “religious”) 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.”>>

 [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.>>


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-- 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)

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