Post Kabul, we need clear, calm thinking

A US Air Force evacuation plane loads passengers at Kabul airport on Tuesday. Picture: AFP / US Air Force

Since the fall of Kabul on Aug­ust 15, countless commentators have likened it to the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The analogy has been a lament and a rebuke. But all that is just emotional and intuitive thinking. What’s needed right now is depth of perspective.

There are analogies between the two wars and their endings. But the fall of Vietnam did not end Pax Americana. We need to avoid catastrophism now and take a deep breath.

The US undertook the war in Vietnam on flawed premises. There have been comparable flaws in the case of Afghanistan. It’s important to get these things embedded in public and agency debate. But we need to bear several in mind; also, that communism failed. The consequences of communist victory in 1975 for the people of Indo-China were shocking. Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia refuted Marxism-Leninism as liberation. The US went on to win the Cold War. And Vietnam realised within a decade that Stalinist autarky was a recipe for poverty. It began to reform and open up.

The US went into Vietnam from 1950 in support of a French neo-colonial war because of the communist victory in China (in 1949), because of the North Korean invasion (in June 1950) of South Korea, and because it wanted France as a NATO ally. These were all mistakes. It compounded them from 1954 by believing the US could succeed where France had failed. It then tasked multiple arms of the US military establishment with winning a guerrilla war, when they’d all been developed to fight World War III in Europe. They floundered.

These were the root causes of American failure in Vietnam. Immediately after 9/11 in 2001, I wrote that we would be wise to assume, for the purposes of strategic thinking, that the Islamists had thought well ahead of their assault on America and hoped to draw it into multiple unsustainable counterterrorist wars. I quoted Che Guevara’s famous remark in the mid-1960s: “We should create two, three, many Vietnams.” The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had that character. The fall of Kabul should concentrate our minds around that idea. But Guevara also failed.

Overwhelming US conventional military capabilities and wealth in the ’60s and 2000s led to poor thinking, extravagant use of force and demoralising failure. But that’s not to say the “good guys” won the guerrilla wars. Nor was the failure in Vietnam as crippling as many feared at the time. Nor need the debacle in Afghanistan be so, provided we take a deep breath and re­frame our thinking.

Just how thinking gets re­framed, however, is a wonderland all of its own. Among the things that confounded the American war in Vietnam, apart from the factors mentioned above, was system-high cognitive failure. The Pentagon and the White House, starting ignorant regarding Vietnam, did not and would not learn. Very late in the piece, as Lewis Sorley showed in A Better War (1999), the American tactical approach to the war was modified. But at the psychological, political and strategic level it really wasn’t.

Sorley wrote in The New York Times in 2009 that those drawing analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan should be careful to understand the Vietnam War accurately if they wished to draw useful lessons. Should we now conclude that no useful lessons were learned? If they were, they nonetheless led to what everyone has been describing as a hauntingly similar debacle at the end.

Pentagon and Rand dissident Daniel Ellsberg was unconvinced in 1971 that anything like the right lessons had been drawn in the later stages of the Vietnam War. Tactical adjustments might have led to incremental improvements in US and South Vietnamese army success against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army, but strategically the war continued to drift away from Washington. That’s why Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers that year, so the public could better understand how decisions had been made for 20 years – without anything like victory.

Fundamental assumptions and drivers of strategic policy were not challenged, and field reports catered to such assumptions or were ignored. In Papers on the War (1972), Ellsberg wrote: “There was a whole set of what amounted to institutional anti-learning mechanisms working to preserve and guarantee unadapt­ive and unsuccessful behav­iour: the fast turnover in personnel, the lack of institutional memory at any level, the failure to study history, to analyse or even record operational experience or mistakes, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level … describing progress rather than problems or failure, concealing the very need for change in approach or for learning.”

It is these cognitive deficiencies that must be addressed if 21st-century strategic policy in Wash­ing­ton or Canberra is to become more effective, as it badly needs to.

Frank Snepp’s brilliant memoir, Decent Interval: The American Debacle in Vietnam and the Fall of Saigon (1977), related how badly Washington, the US embassy and the CIA fumbled the endgame. Snepp had been with the CIA in Saigon during the last years of the war. His account is excoriating. Wash­ington sought to suppress the book. What we badly need now are similar accounts of the counterterrorist wars and the expenditure of many thousands of lives and several trillion dollars to so little effect.

However, the communist victories in Indo-China did not lead to a “fall of dominoes”. They did not lead to a Soviet “roll on” in the Cold War. They did not end Pax Americana. The debacle in Afghanistan will lead to an oppressive and ugly regime in that benighted country under the Taliban and assorted warlords. There may well be other collateral costs, but they need not be catastrophic.

Our strategic task now is to draw breath, reframe how we are looking at the challenges of our time and work with our key allies to ensure that this setback is contained in Central Asia. There’s a lot of clear thinking to do. Let’s get on with it while holding a camera on the awful regime that the Taliban has fought so tenaciously to impose on its fellow Afghans. The liberal democracies have stumbled, but they remain the wealthiest, freest societies in world history. We must renew and defend them against the challenges from neo-authoritarians and Islamists. But we must do so judiciously and cost-effectively.

Lessons learned, it’s game on – if we have the cojones to take it on.

Paul Monk completed a PhD in international relations at the Australian National University in 1988 on US counterinsurgency strategy throughout the Cold War, in Vietnam, The Philippines and El Salvador. He worked in the Defence Intelligence Organisation on China, Japan, the Koreas, Hong Kong and Taiwan between 1990 and 1995.