While working as Hau Nghia province representative for USAID in 1965, retired Lt. Col. John Paul Vann wrote the following letter to General Robert York:
If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government. There is a revolution going on in this country–and the principles, goals, and desires of the other side are much closer to what Americans believe in than those of GVN [the Saigon Government]. I realize that ultimately, when the Chinese brand of Communism takes over, that these “revolutionaries” are going to be sadly disappointed–but then it will be too late–for them; and too late for us to win them. I am convinced that, even though the National Liberation Front is Communist-dominated, that the great majority of the people supporting it are doing so because it is their only hope to change and improve their living conditions and opportunities. If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice–whether to support the GVN or NLF–and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan, pg. 524.
Vann was one of the few Americans who were clear-eyed about the situation on the ground in Vietnam as our forces started arriving in huge numbers during the escalation of 1965. But even he suffered from erroneous assumptions. He believed that we had a strategic imperative to deny South Vietnam to the Chinese. We didn’t. And the North Vietnamese had no intention of allowing the Chinese to dominate them. We were escalating to save a government that wasn’t worth saving, and for strategic purposes that didn’t even exist.
We now face a similar choice in Afghanistan. We know that Karzai’s government is undeserving of Afghans’ loyalty. We know that they are corrupt. We know that their army is a paper tiger. The question, then, is if we have some overriding strategic imperative to prop up this government and train this army. It seems to me that we need to reexamine our assumptions about the enemy there. If the following is true, we need to be honest with ourselves about it.
Indeed, the intelligence reports say the Taliban movement that harbored the Al Qaeda terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is responsible for only a small share of the rising attacks – mostly in southern Afghanistan, according to the officials…
…US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States because it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.
In 1965, US Commanders and politicians often loosely referred to the resistance in Vietnam as pawns of Communist China. They were wrong. And, because they were wrong, we were making a major commitment to prevent something that was never going to happen. Our national security was never threatened by Ho Chi Minh.
Also in 1965, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John McNaughton, wrote the following memo for Bob McNamara, explaining the justification for escalating the war.
70%–To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputations as a guarantor)
20%–To keep SVN (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands.
10%–To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
That was a depressingly candid assessment of our priorities, and helps explain why we were willing to destroy villages in order to save them. What’s interesting is how high a priority our establishment put on saving face. We didn’t want to let South Vietnam go down the drain because it would lead other countries to question our ability to guarantee their security. As Vann had asserted, Vietnam was just a pawn in a larger East-West confrontation. The parallel for our own times is in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. If we abandon Afghanistan, what conclusions will Kuwait, or Qatar, or Oman, or Bahrain, make about our security arrangements with them?
There could be similar implications for our relationships with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. This is the kind of stinking-thinking that got 58,000 Americans killed in Indochina. During the Cold War, we could at least comfort ourselves with the belief that this kind of neo-imperialism was saving people from communist-domination. In the post-Cold War era, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is a thin reed to cling to in justifying what is more accurately described as a desire to sell advanced weaponry and service contracts to new client states.
If we are not really fighting fundamentalists in Afghanistan, then we can’t cite that as our reason for escalation. We have to realistically, and honestly, assess our national security interests. We are in danger of failing to do that. We cannot afford to make the same mistake twice.