The Lessons of History Have Not Been Learned

Following the end of the Vietnam War, journalists and historians spent the next 25 years trying to explain why America had been drawn into a war "it couldn't win" and why it had been so reluctant to admit this unassailable realization. 

In the 1960's, when America first became involved in Indo-China, Americans still believed in the invincibility of their military might. America had prevailed against Japan and Germany only 20+ years before. In Korea, it was felt that we would have overcome North Korea if China hadn't intervened. We thought our superior firepower, and our "can do" military, would surely prevail against a small, vulnerable Communist satellite. We hadn't any experience fighting on the Asian mainland, and we'd never before had to deal with a thoroughly "embedded" guerrilla force, which made it difficult to know who was a friend and who was not. But as that war dragged on, and the atrocities piled up, we discovered that what had worked in Europe and the Pacific, didn't in Vietnam.

The lesson of Vietnam was that, short of employing "weapons of mass destruction" it was unlikely we could overcome an indigenous revolutionary army through the usual ground offensive tactics, especially in the tangled terrain of tropical Southeast Asia. America's failure there, and our open admission of that failure, left a festering scar on our national pride. We had made a big commitment to "liberate" a nation, to preserve its possible future as a model Western-style democracy, but we had utterly failed, in large part because we had ended up nearly destroying a country we were trying to "save." Our indiscriminate use of Agent Orange, "cleansing" the countryside village by village of embedded Viet Cong volunteers, our pragmatic support of a corrupt puppet regime, the killing of hundreds of thousands of blameless civilians--these were the consequences of our adventure in Indo-China.  

Today, 40 years and four wars later, we're trying again to establish "democracy" in Northwest Pakistan, whose proxy government military is attempting, with American support, to eradicate the "Taliban" rebels from mountain villages and towns where they've been hiding, since we subdued Afghanistan. The parallels between our efforts in Pakistan and Vietnam are striking. This morning, reports of villages being shelled and "liberated" are producing the familiar pattern: Thousands of refugees, piles of rubble, disillusioned populations. Once more, we're leveling the countryside in order to "save" it. 

After America left Vietnam (in disgrace), we eventually came to accept the "inevitability" of the unification of Vietnam under a Communist regime. Today, we have diplomatically friendly relations with that country, and our citizens actually travel there with few restrictions. We trade with them. 

The lesson of Vietnam was that you can't bludgeon a country into submission and expect it to cooperate with your agenda, to follow your example of Western style democratic government. There are many objectionable aspects to Islamic fundamentalism, it is diametrically opposed to the way of life we enjoy in parliamentary democracies dominated by capitalistic enterprise. It is perfectly possible to make compelling arguments about how, as a way of life and government, Islam is regressive and harmful. 

But Islam is inextricably interwoven into the fabric of many Asian cultures. It has been a part of their lives for generations. The notion that we can dissect out the "bad" aspects of Islam--to remove it or kill it or "persuade" it with force to back down--is naive. Indigenous peoples, with their own centuries-old culture, can't be expected to adopt our ways and follow our example overnight. Attempting to force them to do so is a recipe for disaster. 

9/11 happened because we ignored all the clues and warning-signs of impending danger. 9/11 couldn't, really, have been much easier for Al Quaeda operatives. Clearly, America has done exactly what Osama bin-Laden wanted, stomping around like an elephant in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, crushing fragile, suspicious populations with sophisticated weaponry and door-to-door street sweeps. 

Vietnam, Iraq I and Iraq II, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, have all been wars of "choice". In each instance, we've told ourselves we could go in, clean out the bad guys, be welcomed as liberators, and leave the place better than we found it. Instead of Communism--the evil we sought to defeat in Vietnam--we now have "international terrorism" as the bad guys. We continue to think that military intervention can be used as a short-hand to bring about rapid, favorable changes in indigenous cultures. But history teaches us that you can't do that. 

Imagine how Americans would feel, for instance, if China--which promises to be the world's next great superpower in this century--were to try to impose itself militarily here. Would any amount of bombing, martial rule, house to house searches, hostage-taking or torture, be likely to blunt our patriotism, subdue our desire to resist, make us compliant hosts to an invading foreign power? 

We can't invade and destroy countries to save them from their own cultures, no matter how extreme or backward or heinous they may seem to us. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Short of a full-scale indefinitely open-ended occupation, requiring 450,000 troops, there is no way we can insure our interests will be served there. Britain, and later the Soviet Union, learned that lesson the hard way. Do we really need to repeat the mistakes of history, again?