Comment: Debate over U.S.’s Afghan war will sound familiar

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, August 18, 2021

By Gregory A. Daddis / Special To The Washington Post

The Taliban has retaken Afghanistan with lightning speed, forcing Americans to grapple with our 20-year-long tragedy in the war-torn Central Asian nation.

U.S. policymakers, military leaders and ordinary citizens have reckoned with such a defeat before, when the United States failed to achieve its political objectives in Vietnam. Indeed, decades later, the loss remains difficult to resolve. It’s easy to overstate the parallels between these two wars, but as the Taliban reemerges as the governing power in Afghanistan, Vietnam teaches that we’re in for an intensive battle over the past, present and future of U.S. foreign policy and military strategy.

The causes of the Vietnam debacle in the 1960s and 1970s were myriad. Top among them: policymakers’ inflated concerns throughout the war about maintaining U.S. credibility. President Lyndon B. Johnson believed the nation’s global standing against communism was at stake when he chose to go to war in Southeast Asia. After the conflict’s end, former national security adviser Henry Kissinger likewise recalled that “nothing less than America’s credibility was at stake” in Vietnam. In reality, the war hardly altered the United States’ global influence, suggesting these fears had been exaggerated.

The realization of a failed war fueled a blame game that began even before combat ended. David Halberstam’s 1972 classic, “The Best and the Brightest,” for example, concluded that “the inability of the Americans to impose their will on Vietnam had been answered in 1968, yet the leadership of this country had not been able to adjust our goals to that failure.”

Naturally, tensions erupted between the legislative and executive branches over who was at fault. President Richard M. Nixon eviscerated politicians on Capitol Hill for supposedly throwing away what had been achieved in Vietnam in a “spasm of congressional irresponsibility.” Congress responded with the 1973 War Powers Act, providing legislators the ability to review and even reverse executive decisions to send troops overseas. In many ways, Vietnam challenged Americans’ confidence in the presidency.

Saigon’s fall also placed pressures on the relationship between U.S. civil and military leaders. Senior commanders lambasted Washington elite in their memoirs, despite fairly clear evidence that victory had been nowhere in sight. Admiral U.S.G. Sharp spoke for many of his peers when criticizing “civilian politico decision-makers” who had “no business ignoring or overriding the counsel of experienced military professionals.”

Not surprisingly, these senior officers’ frustrations prompted the U.S. armed forces to rethink their war-fighting doctrine, organizational structure and tactical orientation. Most uniformed leaders hoped to move on from their failures in counterinsurgency and nation-building — “a mistake to be avoided” noted one former officer — by refocusing their efforts on the Soviet threat in Western Europe.

“If only” counterfactual arguments also sprung up. A cottage industry of postwar armchair generals arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s promoting versions of how the war could have been won: “If only” the military had been allowed to widen the scope of the war; “if only” public support had remained strong; “if only” dissenters in the media had been muzzled; “if only” Jane Fonda hadn’t visited North Vietnam.

Even as the armchair commentariat were offering theories on how the war could have been won, the soldiers and civilians who experienced the Vietnam War personally were reckoning with the trauma of war and defeat. They asked themselves hard questions with few easy answers. Was my sacrifice worth the costs? Did the death, destruction and dislocation facilitate any better state of peace? Popular culture complicated these personal explorations — while usually ignoring Vietnamese voices — by either stigmatizing veterans’ mental health, as in Martin Scorcese’s “Taxi Driver,” or engaging in revenge fantasies like George Cosmatos’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”

Already, today, recriminations over Afghanistan feature many of these same debates and themes.

For example, pundits are sounding alarm bells regarding the impact of withdrawing from Afghanistan on the United States’ international credibility; the same concern often overblown in the Vietnam era. These debates probably will shape future discussions of American interventionism in Central Asia and beyond.

The warnings also are pouring in from ex-military men. Retired Gen. David Petraeus has exhorted that Americans would “regret this decision” to withdraw, intimating that the United States should have continued maintaining a military presence in the country for still more decades to come.

Former three-star Gen. H.R. McMaster has been perhaps the most vocal. Donald Trump’s second national security adviser recently slammed the Biden administration using words like “capitulation” and “crisis on steroids.” As in the post-Vietnam era, these officers tread on dangerous ground when asserting that only military leaders know best how to advance national security; especially in light of the poor performance by the U.S.-trained Afghan forces.

Such criticisms additionally are stoking tensions between Congress and the White House, as the Biden administration confronts criticism for how it has withdrawn from Afghanistan and the stunning speed with which the Taliban regained control. The accusations may fly even more once the dust finally, if ever, settles in Afghanistan.

We’re also already seeing the “could have been” game begin. Iraq “surge” proponent Frederick Kagan, whose addiction to war knows few bounds, is jockeying to lead the charge. Kagan’s recent New York Times piece echoes those Vietnam revisionists who deemed victory attainable. Just a few more troops (and a “slightly increased risk of American casualties”) … Just for a little while more … This time it will be different. Then, and now, however, evidence supporting such counterfactuals often come up short.

Even as this happens, military leaders are looking to move on, as they did with Vietnam. Professional military education schools, like the U.S. Army War College, have wasted little time in fashioning China as a central threat to regional stability and international order. One wonders if those advocating the benefits of counterinsurgency will finally recognize the limits of their flawed approach that only militarizes American presence abroad. Nation-building under the barrel of a gun rarely fulfills the expectations of its advocates.

And finally, the men and women who fought in Afghanistan are lamenting the danger to allies, interpreters and translators, while agonizing over whether their own sacrifices were worth it, given the ultimate outcome.

The fighting in Afghanistan, for Americans at least, appears to be drawing to a close. But if Vietnam is an indicator of things to come, the battle over memory and legacies has only just begun.

Gregory A. Daddis is the USS Midway Chair in modern U.S. military history at San Diego State University and author of “Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam.”