The shadow of the debacle in Southeast Asia hangs heavy and black over us even today thirty-four years after the last helicopter left the embassy roof. There is good reason for this. Twenty years, sixty thousand lives and gigabucks of cash bought the US the first and only clear cut defeat in its history.
For years the memory of the defeat paralysed our foreign policy. Worse, it caused self-induced amnesia in our military. Rather than a sober, harsh analysis of what we did wrong during our years of intervention, the military pretended that we would never again face the unique face of interventionary warfare. (Or to use the new, approved, if not improved, term, Overseas Contingency Operations.)
The Powell Doctrine of Gulf War fame was the epitomization of this institutional lobotomy. We would fight only with overwhelming force, a very clear goal and monolithic political support within We the People.
A few years after the quasi-victory in the Gulf, the US military undertook interventionary operations in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. The first was a failure due to a combination of mission creep, incorrect force package and one episode of disastrously wrong tactics. The second was short and successful as long as one does not look closely at the days after the initial success of inducing the condemned regime to leave office. The third was a success because it relied primarily upon the use of airpower to accomplish a limited end.
In short, none of the three "Overseas Contingency Operations" either allowed or encouraged the US military at the highest command levels to evaluate closely and carefully the nature of prolonged interventionary operations, particularly those which, like our effort in Vietnam, involved counterinsurgency. The crew in and around the Oval Office were even more clueless with respect to the realities of intervention than the military.
Seven years of on-the-job training has given the military a far better understanding of counterinsurgency than it has possessed institutionally at any time since the late 1930s when the Marine Corps issued its justly famed Small Wars Manual. The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan finally linked with the resurrected historical consciousness of the US involvement in the Wars of Vietnam to produce a doctrine which is both relevant to counterinsurgency and generally accepted now on the basis of the successes in Iraq.
The approach outlined by President Obama indicates that the painfully won understandings of counterinsurgency and interventionary operations have penetrated the highest levels of government. The Obamians are not going to repeat the gross errors of either SecDef "Shock-and-Awe" Rumsfeld or cringe behind the parapet of the Powell Doctrine.
As in Vietnam the US military has two main jobs to perform simultaneously. Defeat enemy main force units in the field. Train, equip and support indigenous military and security forces to finish the job and keep the joint quiet after we leave.
There is a danger hiding in these two tensely cooperative tasks. The danger is simple to see, easy to describe but difficult to avoid in practice.
The danger is that US and allied forces will tell the locals, "Out of the way, little guy, we'll do the job."
This attitude of explicit superiority in Vietnam assured that the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) would stand aside, let us do the heavy lifting and not until it was too late take up the burden of war with effectiveness. We came close to doing the same in Iraq, but narrowly avoided falling over the edge.
By keeping a residual presence in Iraq for some time yet, the US will go a long way to assuring that when the indigenous forces finally have the full load they will not collapse under the strain. This is one reason that a clearly announced exit strategy is inappropriate at this time. We can have no idea when the Afghan military and police forces will be up to the task of unaided defense.
Provided the US and allied militaries avoid the impatience driven get-out-of-our-way,-indige, there is every reason to believe that the tasks of breaking the back of the Taliban/al-Qaeda main forces is possible (even if not highly probable) while laying the basis for a tolerably effective Afghan National Force. Accomplishing the second job is important only because it provides necessary political and diplomatic cover for leaving the area after having assured that Taliban and al-Qaeda are denied the chance to claim military victory and present a threat to the US.
The assorted "nation-building" aspects of the Obama Strategy are to be applauded if and only if they are implemented as tools for demobilising support from Taliban and remobilising it to the central government or assuring the uncommitted majority of the population that the government will and can act to both insure peace and promote domestic welfare. The problem is one of implementation.
And, that is one big damn problem.
The problem resides in a well-documented historical reality. People charged with the non-military aspects, the "nation-building" components of counterinsurgency, tend to come with High Minded agendas which rarely, if ever, fit well with the realities of the human terrain, its history, its values, customs, traditions, its fears, hopes and needs. It is even more rare that the agendas of the non-military advisers fit with the grim and harsh requirements of military counterinsurgency.
The historical landscape of the American intervention in Vietnam is littered with civil affairs, nation-building and related programs which served ultimately to fracture the coherency of the war fighting efforts of the US while furthering the political rivalries and corruption which served as an ultimately fatal form of political pernicious anemia for the government of South Vietnam. A set of similar dynamics can be seen blighting our stability oriented efforts in other venues. That includes Iraq.
The endgame of successful counterinsurgency often, but not always, includes some form of power sharing between the government and the insurgents. The precise nature of the final arrangement cannot be seen until after it has emerged. But, it is critical to understand that whatever the final form power sharing might take, it arises organically from the historical soil of the society at large as well as the experiences of the indigenous belligerents. It cannot--must not--be imposed by any external intervenor no matter how High Minded.
The folks with the "nation-building" portfolio seem to have a far more difficult time understanding this fact of historical life than the grunts and those who command them. The documents from previous US interventionary operations as well as those of other countries such as France and the UK indicate this results from the civil uplift types having a greater certainty that their views are correct, ordained On High as it were. In contrast, the hairy chested guys who spend tours in the mud, sand and mountain sides have a more realistic view of those they must fight and those in whose midst they operate.
As long as the Obama administration keeps its collective eye on the central prize--the stated goal of defeating Taliban and al-Qaeda as a threat to the US and its allies (at least in the short- to mid-term) and keeps a tight rein on the "nation-builders," there is a good to very good chance that the US will achieve its minimum necessary strategic goal within the next two or three years. If, however, the people on the non-military side of the team slip the leash and pursue agendas of uplift, Westernization and similar, there is no chance that the "Big Muddy" will be avoided.
You no doubt have noticed that no reference has been made of Pakistan, of the FATA.
"Yer right, Geek. What gives? Chicken?"
No, good buddy, not chicken. Just prudent. Pakistan is a whole different problem. It was not really addressed in the Obama Strategy. That's a subject for another post.
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