‘The good news: Obama understands what’s wrong in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The bad news: He can’t fix it.’
(Fred Kaplan, ‘The AfPak Puzzle’ RealClearPolitics, May 7, 2009)
For most of the ’60s — until the 1968 Tet Offensive, in which for the first time the Vietcong attacked in force, swarming into more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns and cities and penetrating as far as the US embassy in Saigon — Vietnam was a textbook guerilla war.
The Vietcong were battle-hardened; known in the ’50s as the Vietminh, they had fought the French for years and finally defeated them — just as, later, the Taliban’s antecedents had fought the Soviets for nearly a decade and defeated them.
The Vietcong never attacked their US or South Vietnamese opponents in force, and never where they were strong; instead they ambushed patrols and supply convoys, and launched hit-and-run attacks on the smaller US outposts. Moreover, they only feinted at taking territory; the moment US troops arrived to engage them, they would ambush the American vanguard and silently withdraw, occupy another uncontested area and await the Americans there; same thing again.
That’s exactly how the Taliban has been fighting the US in Afghanistan; and how they’re now fighting a half-hearted military in Pakistan.
In Vietnam, a frustrated General Westmoreland increasingly resorted to bombing and missile strikes. Since the Vietcong used the forests as cover, Westmorland also tried to denude those forests with napalm and heavy ordnance (to the extent that, after the war, peasants in many areas couldn’t clear trees for planting crops, there was so much shrapnel embedded in the tree trunks, their machetes kept breaking).
It didn’t occur to Westmorland (or if it did, he didn’t care) that a war dependent on airstrikes was bound to incur high collateral damage. And only deep-seated racism at the Pentagon explains how US generals could embrace the obscene belief that if you kill a man’s child (a ‘native’s’ child), a few dollars (in Afghanistan, the going rate is currently $2,000 per corpse) will dissuade him from dedicating the rest of his emotionally ruined life to helping kill as many of you as he can.
In that way, the US lost the battle for hearts and minds in Vietnam. And in a guerilla war, that battle is in fact the whole war.
In the past year, thousands of Afghan civilians, men, women and children, have been killed by US air strikes. Just last week, 100 villagers were killed in one such strike; the Taliban had been in the village but had left by the time the US warplanes arrived. And US drones operating, supposedly covertly, over Pakistani territory have been taking their own civilian toll there, to the outrage of the ‘natives.’
It’s not surprising that, even though the Taliban are cruel masters, both Afghans and Pakistani civilians overwhelmingly want the Americans to go home. And what can that mean except that the US operation in both countries has already failed?
Last week, the Pakistani military grudgingly bowed to US pressure and began taking on the Taliban entrenched in Swat. That ought to have been the moment when the rubber meets the road, but the half-heartedness of their offensive was quickly signalled by the Pakistani military likewise relying overwhelmingly on airstrikes — airstrikes that have been even more indiscriminate than the Americans’, and have already created hundreds of thousands of refugees.
The whole thing is a disaster.
The Vietnam War was a textbook guerrilla war, and as such has been exhaustively studied by generations of West Point graduates. Then, how come President Obama and the Pentagon are making the same mistakes again in ‘Afpak,’ only on an infinitely greater and more perilous scale than Vietnam?
Part of the answer is that, unlike Vietnam, where the US had no strategic interests and no real reason to be there, the Taliban harbours al Qaeda, which by all accounts is determined to attack the US homeland again. And Obama knows another successful attack would almost certainly cripple his presidency and doom him to a single term in office. By his own lights, he has no choice but to go on trying, however ineffectually, to keep them pinned down where they are.
Also unlike Vietnam, where Westmorland could put half-a-million boots on the ground (and even they weren’t enough), Obama, with the Iraq albatross around his neck, is being hard-pressed to muster one-tenth that number – a laughable ‘expeditionary force.’ Already, therefore, he has been relying disproportionately on airstrikes, with the counter-productive consequence already noted.
Then, too, Johnson and Nixon had client governments in Saigon. The US at least has that in Kabul’s Karzai. But in Pakistan, by contrast, Obama must try to prop up a government where simply to be seen to be propping it up increases the chance of it falling. Anti-Americanism is rife in Pakistan, and in a poll taken last week, fully 34 per cent of Pakistanis announced their support for Osama bin Laden. Even more ominous, sympathy for al Qaeda and the Taliban is widespread too in the Pakistani military and the ISI. Obama needs to face the untenable fact that going to war with al Qaeda in Pakistan may not be all that different from going to war with Pakistan.
Lastly, there’s the elephant in the room: India.
Undoubtedly the Obama administration is exerting all its leverage to persuade the Indian government to make no threatening move towards Pakistan at this stage. But US influence post-Bush is a mere shadow of what it was, and if Pakistan falls into chaos, no one should be surprised if the Indian army were to cross the border in force, not so much to capture territory (though that would be considered lagniappe, ‘brawter’), as to establish and patrol a buffer zone designed to prevent Islamic extremists crossing over from Pakistan in their numbers and inflaming India’s very large and already discontented Muslim minority.
Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the capture of nuclear-armed Pakistan by extremist Muslim elements would pose “a mortal threat to the security and safety of [the US] and the world.” If in extremis the Indian Government does send troops into Pakistan, that world had better hope that, before then, the US will have identified and neutralized every last, striking Pakistani nuclear missile.
