Not quite one month after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, we are now entering the phase when our politicians ask, “Who’s to blame?”After Vietnam, the military and the war fans among the foreign policy establishment established a stab-in-the-back theory of the Vienam War, in which the Pentagon did nothing but win, but the gutless politicians back home. At that time (1974), Gerald Ford was President and Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, and they consciously set up a stab-in-the-back theory to blame Democratic war critics. (See my post More skepticism on Healer-in-Chief Jerry Ford 12/29/2006.
It officially began on Tuesday, when the top three officials responsible for the war—Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin; Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of Central Command—appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One of the most remarkable things about the hearing was that all three admitted that there’s something worth blaming someone for — that the 20-year war, the longest in our history, was a rout. Or, as both generals put it in more delicate but still damning terms, a “strategic failure.” [my emphasis]
John Prados in his excellent book Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) includes these observations:
To this day, war defenders and neo-orthodox historians have been unable to propose a convincing argument for how the Vietnam war could have been won. ...I'll also note here the judgment made by Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense 1961-1968 and one of the chief US decision-makers in the Vietnam War, in a 1999 book, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy:
... some of the defenders and the neo-orthodox have resorted to the proposition that the United States did win in Vietnam. Aside from the fact that Hanoi's troops ended the conflict by marching into Saigon, and not the other way around, this claim ignores a plethora of evidence. In explaining the actual outcome, proponents are forced into a stab-in-the-back argument: Congress lost the war, the Movement lost the war, the press, or whatever. These explanations trivialize historical forces: the social, political, and economic dynamics at work in Vietnam, the United States, and the world. They also distort the political and military events that defined its actual course. The atomization of the history of the war has, until now, made trivialization and distortion easier. Triumph was not forsaken in Vietnam, nor victory lost; there was no day that the war was won, except for Hanoi on April 29, 1975, when its troops marched into Saigon. [my emphasis in bold]
At no time, beginning with the increase of U.S. military advisers early in the Kennedy administration to the final withdrawal of American troops during the Nixon administration, would it have been possible at acceptable cost-in terms of American and Vietnamese lives lost and without the risk of war with China and/or Russia-to achieve a military victory in Vietnam. From 1964 forward, there did not exist an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam with the ability to provide services and security to the rural population of South Vietnam to thereby win over its loyalty. To put it bluntly, America's efforts to substitute for South Vietnam's government and army through force of arms were doomed to failure from the very beginning. Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson at some point in the decisionmaking [sic] process stated that they would not send American boys to do what South Vietnamese boys should be doing. But for various reasons, and on the advice of their senior advisers, they did exactly that. And this nation found out, tragically, that 525,000 American soldiers - however courageous, however well-trained, -equipped, and -supplied - were not the answer to South Vietnam's political problems; the civil war - the Vietnamese "people's war" could not be won by any external military force, no matter how powerful. From 1964 to 1973, the so-called Republic of Vietnam, that is, what we came to know as "South Vietnam," existed only because ot the willingness of the United States to send soldiers to fight on its behalf. When U.S. support was removed, the inevitable results could have been predicted, whether in 1964, 1968, or l973. [my emphasis]As Kaplan makes clear, the embryonic Afghanistan stab-in-the-back narrative is at least as cynical as the Vietnam War one.
In a column the following day, Kaplan expands on this analysis (We Now Know Why Biden Was in a Hurry to Exit Afghanistan Slate 09/28/2021):
Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, both acknowledged at the hearing that the U.S. military was flying blind through much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. The officers of the day tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making them too dependent on U.S. technology and support, so that once we withdrew, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and to the corrosive effects of the Afghan government’s corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So, Biden might well have been thinking, why should he pay attention to anything these guys had to say on the war in Afghanistan, which they’ve been wrong about from the very beginning?This is not to say that the US can never win these kinds of "small wars." The US did stop North Korea from taking over South Korea, for instance. It does say that the US needs to do a better job on assessing the real national interests, the strength of the expected opposition, and the particularities of the international situation in these situations.
Biden made several missteps, some of them disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Most of all, he should have pulled out all the spies, contractors, U.S. citizens, and Afghan helpers before pulling out all the troops. But on the big picture, he was right, and the generals, as they now grudgingly admit, were wrong. [my emphasis]
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