Leaving Viet... Afghanistan
The thing with doing a PhD – or undertaking any major research project for that matter - is that you’re prone to seeing everything through the lens of your topic. Everything you hear becomes a possible quote; everything you see becomes potential material. But having spent many months researching withdrawal from Vietnam, it’s remarkable how much, as Mark Twain once famously said, history rhymes, even if it does not repeat itself exactly. So many sentences in the news could readily be replaced by similar phrases during the Vietnam War.
Perhapsthe most informative quote on withdrawal is this one from Henry Kissinger: “Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded. This could eventually result, in effect, in demands for unilateral withdrawal—perhaps within a year.” Basically, as Kissinger correctly understood, the process of withdrawal needs to be carefully managed and thought-out or it can quickly unravel.
The facts today are the following: the U.S. has announced that it will begin a process of withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2013 with the inevitable consequence that other countries will follow suit. It hopes to retain a residual force in the country even after the phase-out of most combat troops. It’s worth asking, what were the expected or unforeseen effects of a broadly similar policy in Vietnam?
The effect on domestic debate
There’s every reason to believe that Kissinger’s prediction could happen with Afghanistan. Once you announce that you’re leaving irrespective of an elusive “victory” and so, by definition, that the war is not central to the national interest, the dams break. In particular, people will start looking much more critically at the costs of the war. The Mayors' statement a few weeks ago went in this direction. Indeed, Obama himself has suggested he wants to focus on rebuilding the “homefront”. The thing with this is that the pendulum can shift so dramatically that the idea of keeping even a residual force in Afghanistan, and therefore committing to a long-term investment in that country, will become much harder. Nixon never got his planned residual force partly for this reason.
The effect on Afghan troops
When he considered withdrawal, Kennedy noted the “stiffening” effect of having U.S. troops alongside their Vietnamese counterparts. This would disappear as the U.S. troops left. At the same time, his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that a timeline could force the Vietnamese to take over responsibilities in earnest as they become aware that the U.S. would not stay on indefinitely. A similar debate ensued under the Nixon administration over “Vietnamization”. Among the many problems with Vietnamization, one stands out for its applicability today: it was difficult to determine when the Vietnamese were “ready”. In the end, the U.S. withdrew irrespective of this. Nixon threw a lot of expensive equipment at the South Vietnamese government (which, ironically, it couldn’t maintain once the U.S. Congress cut off aid) but had little illusions about the resilience of the local troops. Any reinforcements from the U.S. or “stiffening” was gone and with that, the illusion that the South Vietnamese could resist a North Vietnamese invasion.
The effect on Afghans
The problem, as McNamara also realized in Vietnam, is that Afghans might not want to stick their necks out anymore. In visiting Vietnam in September 1963, McNamara noted that there was “a general atmosphere of watch and wait” and that the Vietnamese had “become afraid of associating too closely with Americans”. He added, “People want to be on the winning side – if word gets around the we have doubts, are cutting aid or likely to pull out, it will reduce the will of the people to resist.” In other words, it’s difficult to get people to believe in your idea of victory if you’re saying it’s not the winning side.
The effect on your troops
The troops in Vietnam were conscripted but they were still professionals. The histories and films of the Vietnam war show a drug-ridden, fragging-prone military but it’s worth noting that these problems only became endemic when the war became so unpopular that it became official administration policy that the U.S. was withdrawing. To put it bluntly (or mildly), it’s difficult on a human level to put your life on the line when you’re being told it’s not worth it.
So what?
None of this means that it’s a bad idea to withdraw, it’s just perhaps a cautionary tale, notably about how to manage the process of withdrawal, and how to frame its public relations aspects. In particular, it will be important to finally identify, and agree on, what the ideal end point in Afghanistan looks like. In the absence of a carefully managed process in that direction, as Kissinger noted, a policy of withdrawal takes on a momentum of its own.
