Obama's War: Afghanistan Is Spelled V-I-E-T-N-A-M

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By

Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his
"necessary" war in Afghanistan.  Coming into office, one of his first acts,
on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing
the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to  about 57,000, to
which one must also add about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and
Australia. That's 100,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban
fighters.

           Ominously, even with the new US troops, US military commander
Admiral Mike Mullen this month has described the situation in Afghanistan as
being  "serious and deteriorating." The Afghani national government -- if an
organization that is basically confined to the capital city of Kabul and a
few other cities can be called a national government -- is hopelessly corrupt
and ineffective, and a current national election, which US forces sought to
"protect" by sending troops to election districts,  appears to have been a
disaster, plagued by vote rigging and with low turnout.

           The US war in Afghanistan, billed as part of a war on terror
begun by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in
September 2001, is now eight years old, and while the Taliban government
that ruled Afghanistan at that time has been ousted from Kabul, its
insurgency grows by the day in strength and popular support.

           The US, meanwhile, is identified as an occupier and as the sole
support of a corrupt regime of drug lords, thieves and charlatans.

           Does this sound familiar? It should. It is a replay of what
America did in Vietnam.

           The roots of the current Afghanistan War lie in the period when
the Soviet Union was occupying the country and backing a Communist-led
government in the 1970s, and the US was conducting a proxy war against the
Soviets, with the CIA training and funding both the Taliban and foreign
fighters, mostly Arab, led by the likes of Osama Bin Laden.  In the end, the
Taliban, with the help of groups like Bin Laden¹s Al Qaeda, triumphed,
pushing the Russians out. But over time, as the Soviet Union crumbled and
the US became more focused on the Middle East, successive US administrations
became less and less happy with the power arrangement in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, following the US Gulf War in 1990-91, Bin Laden and other Arab
fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere began to see the US as an enemy, and
the US began to shift its military focus from being based upon
anti-Communism to being anti-Arab, or at least anti Arabist, as defined as
being opposed to those Arabs who wanted to overthrow the corrupt dictatorial
leaderships in the oil states of the Middle East.

       When the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked in 2001, the
Bush/Cheney administration, which had already planned to overthrow the
government in Iraq, launched an attack on Afghanistan, claiming that its
Taliban government was harboring Al Qaeda, which was blamed for the attacks.
The Afghanistan War was on. The Taliban was quickly ousted from Kabul, and
Al Qaeda was largely driven into the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, but
the war was not won. Indeed, since then, it has gone from bad to worse for
the US, as the Taliban has clawed back territory and recovered much of its
prior power.

           The background of the war in Vietnam dates from 1954, when
Vietnam, after a long struggle, won its independence from its colonial
ruler, France. Two years later, the US blocked a UN-supervised national
referendum, effectively splitting the country into two parts, a Communist
north led by the hero of Vietnam¹s independence struggle, Ho Chi Minh, and
the south, led by the corrupt former French colonial stooge Ngo Dinh Diem.

With elections off, a small group of partisans, the Viet Cong, began an
insurrection against the government in the South in early 1959, which the US
became committed to opposing, initially sending in "advisers" to train and
direct the South Vietnamese army. That war went from bad to worse, and when,
in 1964, it became clear to US police-makers, that the Viet Cong were likely
to win, President Lyndon Johnson made a decision to send in massive numbers
of US troops and to begin a major bombing campaign against the North
Vietnam.  From 2000 US troops in Vietnam in 1961, there were 16,500 in 1964,
and by mid 1965, 100,000. That number continued to rise, reaching 200,000 by
1966, and ultimately, at the height of the war, over 500,000. But the Viet
Cong, and later, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese troops sent down
from the north, were never defeated. Indeed, they continued to grow in
number and in their control of the countryside. While they suffered horrific
losses because of the superior firepower of US forces, and an American
scorched-earth policy in the countryside, the Vietnamese forces continued to
gain more and more support from the Vietnamese people. In the end, after
suffering over 58,000 dead, the US cried uncle and left Vietnam. By 1975,
the puppet regime in Saigon fell, and Vietnam was finally unified again,
under Communist rule.

From the beginning of America's involvement in Vietnam, the country, a poor
nation of peasant farmers, was presented to the American public as a
critical threat to the security of the United States. If Vietnam were to
³fall,² Americans were told, the rest of Southeast Asia, like a chain of
dominos, would fall‹first Cambodia and Laos, then Thailand and Malaysia,
then Indonesia, and finally, even Australia would be at risk.  Of course, no
such thing happened. The Vietnamese Communists were always, and remained, a
nationalist movement, and after winning their multi-generational struggle
for independence, focused on developing their country (though they did step
in and overthrow a genocidal Communist regime that had taken over in
Cambodia, installing a saner government).

It had been a giant scam on the American people from the beginning, and it
ended up costing several million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives,
and 58,000 American lives, though that scarcely tells the toll, in terms of
those crippled mentally and physically, those poisoned by the widespread
spraying of toxic defoliants, and the laying of millions of anti-personnel
mines that are still killing and maiming people in Indochina today.

Now a new president, Obama, like Johnson before him, is telling Americans
that a war half a world away is "necessary for American security." This is a
ludicrous assertion on its face. If Afghanistan, one of the poorest
countries in the world, and really hardly a country at all, is a threat to
US national security, so is Malawi, Burundi and Fiji.

Let¹s be rational for a moment. The Taliban, whatever  their irrational
Islamic fanaticism and their misogyny, have no interest in America, other
than to drive our troops out of their country. When they were in charge in
Kabul back in 2001, they had their hands full just trying to hang on in the
face of the war lords and drug kingpins who held (and still hold) sway in
various parts of the country, and when they eventually win and drive the US
and its NATO allies out of Afghanistan, they will have their hands full
again, just clinging to power.

American national security is not to the slightest degree threatened by the
Taliban.

Okay, so back in 2001 there was a gang of Arabs in Afghanistan which had
since 1990, at least, expressed some hostility towards the US, but that
crew, after all, had been set up by the CIA in the first place, and anyway,
by 2002 it had been largely shattered and driven out of Afghanistan, and
into Pakistan and parts unknown.

The current Afghanistan War, which President Obama claims is so necessary to
American security, is not against Al Qaeda though; it is against the
Taliban, and it simply cannot be won, anymore than the US war against the
Vietnamese could be won.

Today, as in the late 1960s, the Pentagon is telling the president that it
needs more troops. There is a military imperative not to lose a war. No
general or admiral wants to be the guy in charge when the jig is declared
up, and the troops have to be brought home as losers. And so they are asking
for more and more troops and weapons, in hopes of hanging on until they get
get cashiered out.

Obama, like Johnson before him, will buy into this criminal policy, because
he too doesn¹t want to "lose" a war before he leaves office.

That should be pretty scary, since I'm sure Obama is hoping that he will be
in office not just through 2012, but through 2016. That¹s a long time to
keep escalating a hopeless and pointless conflict, just to avoid having to
say it was a mistake in the first place.

But lest you say that it cannot happen, recall that the first US advisers
went to Vietnam in 1959, the big escalation began in 1964, and the US didn¹t
leave until 1974. That¹s 15 years of war and ten years of major warfare.

Because the Bush/Cheney administration was always more interested in
invading Iraq than in invading Afghanistan, and pulled out many troops from
the latter country in late 2002 to ship them to Iraq, the Afghan War has
escalated more slowly than the Vietnam War did. But I'd say that today we
are about where we were in Vietnam at the start of 1965. That is, the big
lie, and the big escalation in the fighting, are both just getting going.

If the American people don¹t rise up and demand an end to this thing right
now, we could be in for another 8-10 years of brutal and bloody warfare, and
in the end, the United States is, once again, going to lose.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is "The
Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin¹s Press, 2006). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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