Since the fall of Kabul last Sunday week, countless commentators have likened it to the fall 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 the 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 in mind, also, that Communism failed. The consequences of Communist victory in 1975 for the peoples of Indochina were shocking. Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia refuted Marxism-Leninism as ‘liberation’. The US went on to win the Cold War. And Vietnam realized, 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. Those 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 counter-terrorist wars. I quoted Che Guevara’s famous remark, in the mid-1960s, ‘We should create two, three, many Vietnams.’ The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq have had that character. The fall of Kabul should concentrate our minds around that idea. But Che Guevara also failed.
Overwhelming American conventional military capabilities and wealth in both the 1960s and 2000s, led to poor thinking, extravagant use of force and demoralizing failure. But that’s not to say that 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 that we take a collective 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. In simple terms: 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 himself, in 2009, wrote, in the New York Times, 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 may have led to incremental improvements in US and ARVN success against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, but strategically the war continued to drift away from Washington. That’s why Ellsberg, that year, leaked the Pentagon Papers, so that the general public could better understand how decisions had actually been made for twenty years – without anything like victory.
Fundamental assumptions and drivers of strategic policy were simply not challenged and field reports either catered to such assumptions or were ignored. Ellsberg wrote, in his classic set of essays Papers on the War (1972):
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 analyze 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, whether in Washington or in 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 Embassy and the Agency fumbled the endgame. He’d been with the CIA in Saigon during the last years of the war. His insider account is excoriating. Official Washington sought to suppress the book. What we badly need right now are similar accounts of the counter-terrorist wars and the expenditure of many thousands of lives and several trillion dollars to so little effect.
However, the Communist victories in Indochina 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 the 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 have fought so tenaciously to impose on their 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 both 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 ANU in 1988 on American counter-insurgency strategy throughout the Cold War, in Vietnam, the Philippines and El Salvador. He worked in the Defence Intelligence Organization on China, Japan, the Koreas, Hong Kong and Taiwan between 1990 and 1995.