In early September, conservative pundit George Will declared in the pages of the Washington Post that Afghanistan’s persistent downward spiral is America’s cue to exit. There soon ensued another Will column urging that US troops be withdrawn from Iraq within the next year. Bucking the trend on the Right, the National Review’s Peter Hesgeth argued that the US cannot remain locked into such nation-building endeavors forever. The conservative wall of silence, if you will, is beginning to show cracks over these latest overseas projections of American power.
The fundamental lesson to be learned from the tortured US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is the importance of picking one’s fights wisely. There are two main criteria on which the decision to go to war should be based. First of all, is the war necessary? Second of all, is it winnable? In answering these questions, it is instructive to examine how the last counterinsurgent quagmire the US faced, the Vietnam War, became such a drawn-out and futile bloodletting. Notwithstanding the hackneyed use of that war to caution against every new American military adventure, rarely have the correct conclusions been drawn from it.
In the Korean War of the early 1950s, the coalition fighting to reverse communist North Korea’s invasion of the South was ultimately shoved back by a massive Chinese counterattack. This taught US policymakers that China was loath to tolerate any anti-Communist beachheads on its border. A decade later, North Vietnam’s location next door to China enabled Moscow and Beijing to supply the Vietnamese communists with relative impunity. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could not sever the enemy’s supply lines without risking another direct—and possibly nuclear—confrontation with China. Hence they settled for carpet-bombing North Vietnam and slaying as many Viet Cong guerrillas as they could until the South Vietnamese army could defend the country independently. Unfortunately, the South Vietnamese army proved incompetent and cowardly, and the regime for which it fought grew autocratic and corrupt. This, and the military havoc wreaked on the country, alienated South Vietnamese civilians in droves, pushing many into the arms of the Viet Cong. Moreover, the North Vietnamese possessed greater patience—and a far higher tolerance for bloodshed—than the American people had. Conclusion: the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
Furthermore, in training its sights on Southeast Asia, the United States had picked a fight with the wrong commies. North Vietnam never served as a bastion of Soviet-sponsored subversion. Like Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was Marxist, but neutral between the dueling superpowers, fearing Russian and Chinese as well as American domination. In fact, after Hanoi emerged victorious in 1975, Vietnam was at war with its Communist neighbors in Cambodia and China before decade’s end. Conclusion: the Vietnam War was unnecessary.
I see the true lessons of Vietnam as follows. First, do not target enemies that pose no threat, for that leads to unnecessary war. Second, avoid fighting counterinsurgencies in locations where the military cannot choke off the rebels’ supplies at the source, for that leads to unwinnable war. The Bush Administration, in its hegemonic hubris and profound historical ignorance, learned not one of these lessons. The guerilla warfare that followed the toppling of the Taliban and Ba’athist regimes caught Uncle Sam with his striped pants down. Having never seen these insurgencies coming, the Pentagon put too few boots on the ground to grapple effectively with the rebels in either country. Hence the belated troop “surge” implemented by President Bush in Iraq in 2007, and the current surge President Obama has ordered in Afghanistan. These have to be two of the deadliest games of catch-up ever played.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have found supplies and shelter in neighboring Pakistan, while Iraq’s Shi’ite militias benefit from aid from their coreligionists in adjacent Iran. The US military cannot tackle Iran directly, and the Pakistani government has so far proven unable to suppress the Taliban sympathizers within its own borders. Once again, the US has gotten itself—and its NATO allies—into a scrap with guerrillas whose sources of supply are all but untouchable. That US forces have yet to win the hearts and minds of Afghan and Iraqi civilians only compounds these colossal blunders.
Conclusion: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may well prove to be unwinnable.
The news that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to anyone besides his own people grew stale years ago. At this point, it almost goes without saying that the Iraq War was unnecessary. The casus belli in Afghanistan, however, was virtually unassailable, complicating the question of that war’s necessity. Al-Qaeda had planned the greatest civilian mass slaughter in American history from its caves in Afghanistan; their ruling Taliban allies refused to turn the perpetrators over to the US to be brought to justice; therefore Al-Qaeda, Taliban and all had to go.
Yet the Taliban regime was toppled, and the country cleansed of Al-Qaeda bases, almost eight years ago. The counterinsurgency that ensued has aimed to enable the Afghan government to prevent the Taliban’s return to power on its own. It has also struggled to bequeath to Afghanistan at least the basic framework of a stable, durable democracy. On both counts, the war has thus far gone atrociously. On at least the latter of those two counts, the same can be said for Iraq. Both countries’ new constitutions establish Islam as the state religion and enshrine Islamic sharia in the laws of the land. Have we forgotten the Afghan who was prosecuted for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity some years ago, and had to leave the country? Has the law recently passed by the government in Kabul making it legal for husbands to rape their wives already slipped our minds? Whatever these laws are, they are not democratic. Clearly, the backward cultures that make such injustices possible are inhospitable to democracy.
Conclusion: the initial military campaign in Afghanistan was necessary; the sanguinary nation-building, democratizing effort that followed it may not be.
So why the reluctance to “bug out” of both conflicts? Once again, a comparison with the ignominious US retreat from Vietnam in 1975 comes in handy. The US withdrawal was indeed followed by a bloodbath; thousands of Vietnamese refugees fled the country’s Communist crackdown in the late 1970s. The disco era also saw Marxist forces gain strength throughout what was then still known as the “Third World”. From Nicaragua to Grenada to Angola to Afghanistan itself, it seemed that America’s defeat in Vietnam had emboldened its enemies to seek ever greater advantage. Nor was it only the Soviets and their clients who concluded that the US was in fact a “paper tiger”. Iran went Islamist in 1979, and has been a persistent thorn in America’s Middle Eastern flank ever since. Shortly before Syria invaded Lebanon in 1976, President Hafez Al-Assad is said to have sneered to Henry Kissinger: “You’ve betrayed Vietnam. Someday you’re going to sell out Taiwan. And we’re going to be around when you get tired of Israel.”
When the US beats a hasty retreat from a conflict to which it has committed immense amounts of blood and treasure, anti-American forces worldwide take note—and take advantage. Osama bin Laden took inspiration from the US pullout from Somalia in 1993, concluding that the Great Satan lacked the belly to quell a protracted insurrection. Thus American war hawks’ insistence on “staying the course” should not be dismissed out of hand. Islamist forces, whether Sunnis sympathetic to al-Qaeda or Shiites allied with Iran, will not be kind to any country the US leaves in the lurch.
President Bush, then, painted the US into a corner by invading Iraq unnecessarily and arguably overstaying America’s welcome in Afghanistan. In so doing, he has left his successor quite the dilemma. President Obama can either soldier on and risk wasting more American lives and dollars to no avail, or begin pulling the troops out and risk allowing both war-torn countries to collapse into even greater mayhem—and strengthening America’s mortal enemies into the bargain. Either outcome would cost the United States, and those who depend on it for their survival, dearly. If the US is to continue to lead the free world, its leaders must learn to avoid plunging into these dead-end conflicts in the first place. Being—and remaining—the world’s greatest power means knowing when to stay off the warpath. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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