Afghanistan and Vietnam

We are back to escalating in Afghanistan.

There are limits to what one can do with bombs and drone strikes.  They don't win friends.

The New York Times this morning has a news story on victory in Afghanistan.   It begins with the following story:

In the aftermath of 9-11 America treated the event at the opening strike in a worldwide war on terror.   There were policy choices available.  We could have treated it as an criminal conspiracy to do mass murder, and then sought out and arrested or killed the people involved in the conspiracy.  This would include telling the Afghan government that we were going to send people into Afghanistan to root them out so they should expect American troops.   It would have been an attack on the crime, not an attack on the government and people.

That is how we treated Timothy McVey and the Oklahoma City bombing--as a criminal act.

We have gone to war in far away places hoping to create, with weapons of war, a pro-American government, against the tide of the culture, politics, religion, and national history of a far-away, technologically less complex people.  We know how this can work out.   The Vietnam War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) displays the horrors of American bombing, the Agent Orange, the napalm.  They describe them as birth pains they endured in establishing their nation, a unified Vietnam.  American war efforts hardened their resolve at the time, and now are remembered as points of pride.  See the hits we could take.

Our efforts did not frighten them off.  It steeled their resolve.

The Bush-Obama policy was unpopular here in America because it was protracted and seemed to have little good effect.  We were not creating a viable pro-American government and population, and apparently still are not.   Trump successfully campaigned against this war, rather like the way that Obama eight years before won election by campaigning against "stupid wars."   Anti-war classmates from college told me in October, 2012, that they expected to vote for Trump--notwithstanding huge reservations otherwise--because they considered him the anti-war candidate.    Americans anti-war candidates if their talk can be described as peace with honor.   We want to be able to declare victory.

Lyndon Johnson was sucked into Vietnam.  Obama was stuck in place in Afghanistan.  Trump promised change, but the change is that he is being sucked in deeper again.  Surely more of what did not work will change the dynamic on the ground.

Heroin poppies are the financially viable crop grown by rural Afghanis.  We destroy the crop.  We have tools we are reluctant to use: people on the ground in harm's way.  America has tools of war we are willing to use: bombs, missiles, drones--so that is what we use.

For some reason, the war for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people is not working.