From the Mekong to the Helmand: Is Petraeus playing the same old movie?

I do not agree with this, but Professor Blackton sure is raising questions worth addressing. 

By John Stuart Blackton
Best Defense Helmand River Valley bureau chief

Kai Bird’s essay in Politico on the similarities between our engagements in Afghanistan and Vietnam is worth pondering.  Bird doesn’t know either country up close, nor does he know a lot about warfare, but he is a sharp long-term observer of Washington.

I spent four years in the Indochina War and even more in Afghanistan over several decades.  While the two countries have nothing in common and the two societies have even less, America’s manner of engaging the two places has all sorts of commonalities.  We are the constant in the two equations. 

Looked at from the American perspective, I see some merit in Bird’s analogy.  He doesn’t get everything right, but he asks many of the right questions. 

I have noticed the Ruff Puffs and the CAPs coming back into the argument  on your blog as P4 tries out a variant of village militias in Afghanistan. What some of your Vietnam vet posters may be missing about the Ruff Puffs and the CAPs is that they were, no doubt, modestly successful tactical responses, but they were not decisive.  We lost.  

I was among the legions who worked on the current counterinsurgency manual and one of the things that the old guys (like me) found ourselves reminding the younger folks was that almost all these historical experiments in COIN that we were mining were ultimately failures.  Not tactical failures, but failures at the strategic level–which is the only level that counts in the long run.  The Algerians won.  The North Vietnamese won.  

Eating soup with a knife doesn’t change the underlying realities of a political situation which the Americans have failed to read correctly. If counterinsurgency were a video-game, fought village by village with a running tally of points for wins and losses at the local level, COIN doctrine would be much more helpful. But long wars are more than the sum of tactical events.  Bird’s essay underscores the weaknesses in America’s application of top-level political and strategic thinking to the problem.

We left Vietnam covered with stickers that urged the Vietnamese to “see it through with Nguyen Van Thieu.” This time we may be asking the Afghans to “See it through with Hamid who?”

Professor John Stuart Blackton
Managing Director, Strategic Advisory Services