Why We're Screwed in Afghanistan

I badly want our project in Afghanistan to go well. My son is there as I write this. Over this past eleven months of his deployment, I’ve gotten to know his fellows, their families, and the widows and parents of the heroes from his company who have died there. I want their effort, their blood, their lives – the risks he has taken and is taking today – to matter by bringing us closer to some national goal.

And yet, they’re not.

Who – seriously – believes that the path we’re on in Afghanistan today will be looked on in a decade as a victory?

The problem isn’t the troops – they are incredibly brave and competent. It isn’t even the grand tactics – CounterTerror or COIN anyone? Tactics matter, but the reality of either as applied on the ground blurs the distinctions our strategists dispute so seriously in Washington or Kabul.

The problem isn’t fate – as a nation, I reject Bacevich’s notion that we’re doomed to fail in long, costly, slow wars in far-away places.

The problem is confusion. It’s confusion between means and ends, between methods and goals, and between sending signals, winning hearts and minds, and killing bad guys. It’s simple confusion about what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan and how we’ll know we’re doing it.

I’m not talking about the Strategy-Of-The-Month club as proclaimed by our ever-changing military leadership in Washington or Kabul. That is a symptom, not a cause. It’s a symptom of a deeper failing that’s taking place at a still higher level – on Pennsylvania Ave. between the Congress and the White House.

Afghanistan isn’t a new Vietnam – but we’re acting like it is. We’re making many of the same mistakes that we made in losing back in the 1970’s today.

In Col. Harry Summers Jr’s On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, he attempts to set out the military history of Vietnam, the domestic and military politics around it, and analyzes them in light of his reading of Clausewitz.

There are a few critical ways that we’re acting like we did in Vietnam (as well as some critical ones in which we’re different).

Here are some highlights from Summers’ book, and a commentary on how and why I think the points he makes are relevant.

He opens his book:

TACTICAL VICTORY, STRATEGIC DEFEAT

“You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said the American colonel.

The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. “That may be so,” he replied, “but it is also irrelevant.”

Conversation in Hanoi, April 1975

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Vietnam war from the Army’s point of view is that as far as logistics and tactics were concerned we succeeded in everything we set out to do. At the height of the war the Army was able to move almost a million soldiers a year in and out of Vietnam, feed them, clothe them, house them, supply them with arms and ammunition, and generally sustain them better than any Army had ever been sustained in the field. To project an Army of that size halfway around the world was a logistics and management task of enormous magnitude, and we had been more than equal to the task. On the battlefield itself, the Army was unbeatable. In engagement after engagement the forces of the Viet Cong and of the North Vietnamese Army were thrown back with terrible losses. Yet, in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States, that emerged victorious. How could we have succeeded so well, yet failed so miserably? That disturbing question was the reason for this book.

Read the rest at Winds of Change…