Having raised a few angry reactions for singling out some pretty venal behaviour in the previous post, Talleyrand shall now offer some ‘constructive criticism’ for the record:
As already suggested some weeks ago, America’s wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan are analogous in some ways, but not in others.
As cases of armed, external intervention, and as internationalised civil wars, they are analogous.
As examples of the Primat der Innenpolitik (on all sides, more or less), they are also analogous. For example, as regards the principal intervening power, the United States, they are examples of an intervention accompanied initially by strategic myopia, and terminally by political myopia, each having little inherently to do with realities of the place and people being intervened against.
Those are proper analogies to draw.
Some people have also asked critics of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan if they don’t wish the United States had remained fighting in Vietnam indefinitely.
This is not a proper analogy, for a number of obvious reasons.
The first concerns the aims of each intervention. The Americans’ aim in Vietnam was not to unify the country under non-communist rule, or to establish a permanent colony. Whatever it can be accused of being in practice, the declared aim was to establish a viable non-communist southern polity that could defend itself against a domestic, and then a more transnational, insurgency.
That aim was more or less achieved by the time the United States forces withdrew, or so say a number of historians. Others disagree. But what few disagree with is the belief that the withdrawal of assistance by the US Congress after that point did not aid the survival of South Vietnam and probably advanced its demise. (Something similar may be said of the Soviet withdrawal of support from its Afghan clients, who also were viable for some time after 1989.)
To say, then, that South Vietnam would have collapsed, with or without long-term American assistance in one form or another, is speculation. To call it speculation is not, however, to pass judgement on whether the intervention was wise in the first place, or on whether the aim was ever worth the blood of an American soldier.
The normative case in Afghanistan today is different. The basis for intervention in 2001 was an aim, probably misguided, of underwriting a unified, stable polity that would never again offer domestic sanctuary to transnational insurgents. Perhaps the American people should not have pledged their blood and treasure to that aim, but pledge it their leaders did. And now they have cancelled it after convincing a good many Afghans – not all cynics and thieves – to regard it as genuine.
The predictable and predicted result appears indistinguishable from a willed outcome. But, to say that the Taliban would be doing exactly what they are doing now regardless of a US and NATO armed presence, however small, is not speculation. It is a fable. It negates the fact of what has just happened. To call it a fable, however, is again not to pass judgement on whether George W Bush should have branded an American flag on the Taliban’s defeat twenty years ago, or on whether the aim would be worth the loss of any more American blood and treasure. No analogy, genuine or false, grants a monopoly on ethics.
The venal brigade may say, so what? Who cares if some analogies don’t work? Our boys are home and that’s that.
Well yes, but here’s one more analogy to consider: The manner by which America’s former longest war ended contributed to, and may well have brought about, a regional conflagration involving most of Vietnam’s neighbours, with all that that entailed (the killing fields, boat people, etc). Do you really want to see something similar happen in Central Asia? You’ll note that some of Afghanistan’s neighbours are or are close to being nuclear-armed and, well, can sometimes be rather disputatious.
Maybe all this is someone else’s problem in someone else’s backyard. But if what America has done with its muddled intervention counts as something worse than a crime, we probably haven’t even begun to see the end of it.