VIETNAM, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN — LESSON LEARNED?
Craig R. Whitney
United States forces will be out of Afghanistan, President Biden has promised, by Sept. 11 — twenty years to the day after devastating attacks by the al Qaeda Islamic terrorists based there that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. President George W. Bush then sent troops into Afghanistan to drive al Qaeda out. That mission, backed by Britain and later by other NATO allies, was accomplished within a few months. But it mushroomed into something much bigger and more difficult: trying to make multi-ethnic Afghanistan into something it had never been in all its history — a unified nation-state at peace with itself and with its neighbors. Thousands and thousands of American troops and civilian contractors tried over two decades to do that, but it was something that could only be accomplished by the people of Afghanistan themselves, and they remain profoundly divided.
We did make some things better over time — women, treated as inferior under strict Islamist rule, can now go to school and work in cities controlled by President Ashraf Ghani’s government. But not in territory around the country won in battle by its fundamentalist Taliban opponents, who will continue the struggle after the Americans are gone. But as Biden told the joint session of Congress a few days ago at the end of his first 100 days in office, “After 20 years of valor and sacrifice, it is time to bring those troops home.” The war in Afghanistan was “never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking of nation-building,” he concluded.
What will happen to President Ashraf Ghani’s shaky coalition in Kabul after the Americans are gone is unclear. We could look to the past for answers, none of them reassuring. The British, vying with Russia and Persia to control Afghanistan as the “gateway to India” in the mid-19th century, suffered military disaster at the hands of the fierce Afghan tribesmen who opposed their invasions then.
In modern times, Afghanistan taught the Soviet Union a bitter lesson after Moscow sent in 100,000 troops to support an Afghan Marxist-Leninist coalition that had seized power in 1979. The Soviets soon found themselves fighting an increasingly effective Islamic military resistance, a collection of armed groups that eventually got covert support from the United States with Stinger shoulder-held missiles supplied by the CIA. The resistance, the Mujahideen, including the groups that later became the Taliban, inflicted 15,000 casualties on the Soviet forces over 10 bloody years of fighting. Millions of Afghan civilian refugees had to flee, and many thousands died in the fighting.
By early 1988, a new Soviet leadership under Mikhail S. Gorbachev was ready to turn the page if negotiations in Geneva could produce an agreement to let Moscow pull out its troops. A political settlement of the civil war in Afghanistan, he said in a speech on Soviet television that February, was up to the Afghans. Chastened and weakened, the Russians completed their withdrawal in February of 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.
The Afghan government that Gorbachev had left dangling in Kabul lasted only a year after that. The civil war raged on more violently than ever, with half a dozen Mujahideen armies under different warlords across the country until the Taliban became dominant enough to seize control in Kabul in 1996. They welcomed Osama bin Laden after he was expelled from Sudan that year, and his al Qaeda helped the Taliban to win control over 90 percent of the rest of the country by 2001. Then came 9/11.
If the United States had paid more attention to the Russians’ ordeal in Afghanistan, American troops might have been withdrawn quickly in 2001 after defeating al Qaeda. Leaving them there instead was one way, we told ourselves, of guaranteeing that bin Laden could not make a comeback (he had fled to a compound in Pakistan, where he was not found and killed by a team of U.S. Navy Seals ten years ago, at the beginning of May, 2011).
Instead, we stayed on. And in 2003 the Bush Administration invaded Iraq to end the rule of Saddam Hussein, on the false premise that he was developing weapons of mass destruction — U.S. forces discovered after he was gone that he had none. Instead of turning Iraq into something like a democracy, the intervention caused mass casualties. After most American troops had been withdrawn, to the takeover of 40 percent of the country by ISIS, a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group even deadlier, especially to the Shiite population, than al Qaeda. American air power and largely Shiite Iraqi government troops finally expelled ISIS.
But what we have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is repeating many of the same mistakes we made half a century ago in Vietnam! That, too, was a misbegotten attempt at nation-building in a country that American policymakers, blinded by Cold War fear of Communist expansion in the Pacific by the Soviet Union and China, never really understood.
Robert S. McNamara, as Secretary of Defense in the mid-1960s, had overseen the buildup of American forces in South Vietnam to more than 500,000 in the mid-1960s to combat the Vietcong insurgency, supported by Communist North Vietnam with military aid from Beijing and Moscow. But decades after the American war ended in disaster, he acknowledged, in his 1995 memoir “In Retrospect,” that he and others had made myriad mistakes out of ignorance.
McNamara cited “misjudgments of friend and foe alike” that “reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.” By 1973, America was exhausted by the seemingly endless war. Desperate to get out no matter what happened later, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon negotiated a withdrawal of the remaining American troops over the objections of South Vietnam’s President Nguyen van Thieu.
But, crucially, the agreement with Hanoi allowed the North Vietnamese forces that had invaded the south in force in 1972 to stay in place in areas they controlled. “I see that those whom I regard as friends have failed me,” Thieu lamented. Two years later, the North Vietnamese rolled south again and reunified the country — their country, not ours, and President Gerald R. Ford declined to send troops or bombers in again to prevent their victory.
Vietnam was never a Chinese satellite; it had been resisting Chinese intimidation over many centuries. And as one country again, in 1979, it fought a border war with China after Beijing attacked to teach the Vietnamese a lesson for their aggression against Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia.
Today Vietnam is still communist and still one country. Its people are at peace and warmly welcome American visitors, and they will again if we all finally win the battle with Covid-19.
So, back to Afghanistan, the answer to the question what will become of that country after we leave, should be this: Only the Afghan people, in all their diversity, can decide that.
