Avoiding a Vietnam Redux in Afghanistan
By Nick Danby
Trying to fulfill a campaign promise before the next election, U.S. President Donald Trump committed to negotiating with the Taliban in order to withdraw about 14,000 U.S. troops and end another “endless war” in this troubled and divided region. This effort blew up in early September when a Taliban attack killed an American soldier. Then, word got out that Trump had invited the Taliban to Camp David. Despite cancelling the peace talks for now, the White House is eager to resume negotiations.
What’s the rush?
If it’s saving American lives, American troops are already serving in non-combat, advisory roles, and the number of those killed in Afghanistan make up less than “20 percent of the troops who died in non-combat training incidents” in 2018, according to the Atlantic Council.
If cutting costs is the reason, it shouldn’t be. The war costs less than $52 billion or about seven percent of the annual U.S. defense budget. Afghan forces also shoulder almost all the burden as they continue to develop and improve their army, air force, and police force. More importantly, the costs of abandoning Afghanistan now far outweigh the costs of this conflict.
Trump seems keen to withdraw regardless of the consequences, and many national security professionals support his decision. Scholars like Stephen Walt and Andrew Bachevich invoke the irreversible folly of Vietnam as their primary motivation for getting out of Afghanistan.
Unlike in Vietnam, however, there is no domestic clamor or international pressure for the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan; the war in Afghanistan is out of sight, out of mind. In July 2018, Rasmussen found that only 58 percent of voters knew the U.S. was still fighting a war in Afghanistan. As George C. Herring explains in Foreign Affairs, the Vietnam War “was deeply and irredeemably unpopular” and left Nixon and Kissinger with “little choice but to settle quickly for the best terms possible,” while Afghanistan has not incited enough protests and public fervor to force a discussion about American withdrawal.
The persistent application of this Vietnam analogy has imperiled the Afghanistan withdrawal strategy. Just as the U.S. gave up on victory in Vietnam and focused on stopping North Vietnamese infiltration in South Vietnam, the U.S. has recognized that it can no longer win the war in Afghanistan and is focused on stopping the Taliban from taking over the country. Just as Nixon pursued “Vietnamization” of the war, current American civilian and military officials have shifted the focus of American troops from combat to training. Most recently, Trump sought negotiations with the Taliban while excluding the Afghanistan government in a move eerily similar to Kissinger’s decision to directly negotiate with the North Vietnamese without the South Vietnamese as a recognized party. Furthermore, Afghanistan’s government is as divided and corrupt as South Vietnam’s—if not more so.
In adhering to this historical analogy, national security thinkers and Trump officials are poised to end the war in Afghanistan as inadequately as the U.S. ended the Vietnam War 44 years ago.
According to recent reports, both the U.S. and the Taliban agreed to a U.S. withdrawal in exchange for a Taliban promise to deny protection and support for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. These terms mirror those of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, in which the U.S. agreed to withdraw its military forces from South Vietnam while North Vietnamese troops remained in South Vietnam.
Just as the Taliban promised to prohibit any safe havens for terrorists, the North Vietnamese promised to free American prisoners of war and participate in “free and democratic elections.” We all know how well that promise was kept. After Nixon’s two-year “decent interval” between the Paris Peace Accords and the fall of Saigon, U.S. officials frantically fled Vietnam in military helicopters and “watched in horror as their associates fled the country by sea or were executed or jailed for their service to the United States”.
What makes us think this withdrawal will be any better? It will probably be far worse. Unlike North Vietnam, the Taliban poses a direct threat to American national security. As Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, once rationalized, allowing the Taliban to return to power would lead Al-Qaeda to “move back into Afghanistan, set up a larger presence, recruit more people and pursue its objectives against the United States even more aggressively.” Internally, the Taliban’s brutal treatment of women, dangerous fundamentalist doctrine, and massacre of civilians pales in comparison to the Viet Cong, even when factoring in the latter’s known atrocities. Afghanistan today is also far weaker than South Vietnam in 1973; the government’s chance of survival after U.S. withdrawal is bleak. The negotiated terms are not promising either. Does anyone really believe the: will the Taliban reallywill turn against terrorist organizations when American troops aren’t lurking in the shadows?
Even if the Taliban decided to uphold its end of the negotiated bargain, U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis predicted that around 20 terrorist groups would still “use the freedom afforded by an American troop pullout to try to launch operations against Western targets.” Perhaps most importantly, peace is not guaranteed. The primary warring parties (the Afghan government and the Taliban) are nowhere near reaching a ceasefire agreement, let alone sitting down for an intra-Afghan dialogue.
With a more dangerous adversary, weaker ally, and unlikely peace, a student of history can only assume that after Trump’s “decent interval,” Afghanistan will once again become a pre-9/11, Taliban-controlled state rife with human rights violations, wasted potential, and destabilizing behavior.
If eighteen years of fighting are to be salvaged, the U.S. should reframe the war’s purpose. Victory no longer means defeating and eradicating the Taliban but protecting Afghanistan’s experiment with democracy and maintaining the country’s security. The objective is an enduring peace grounded in a political process that incorporates the Taliban, Afghan government, and other regional players.
The U.S. should clearly stipulate that it will only withdraw troops when a permanent peace has been achieved. Washington officials could initiate a staged withdrawal of U.S. troops but must maintain counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism forces to protect regional, American, and Afghan security. In the short term, Trump should call off all negotiations, encourage peace during the upcoming Afghan elections, and pivot his administration’s focus towards strengthening intra-Afghan negotiations.
Although America royally messed up one withdrawal, it is not historically obligated to mess up another.
Nick J. Danby is a senior at Harvard University studying history and government. He is Chairman of the Harvard Undergraduate Alexander Hamilton Society, Chair of the Harvard National Security Group and former editor-in-chief of Tempus: The Harvard Historical Review and international editor of the Harvard College Law Review. He has worked for the U.S. Senate, The Cohen Group, the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense, and worked as a strategy consultant for the F-35 program. He is from Bangor, Maine.
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