The Surprising Lessons of Vietnam
Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes.
By Evan Thomas and John Barry | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009
Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, “Let me pass you to General McChrystal.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: “Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?” Karnow’s reply was just as simple: “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place.”
Words of wisdom, but not all that useful to General McChrystal. Like it or not, he is already in Afghanistan, along with roughly 68,000 American and 35,000 European troops. McChrystal has been charged by President Obama with presenting a strategy for victory, generally defined as standing up the Afghan Army to beat back the Taliban and deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda. An avid reader of history, McChrystal has read Karnow’s book, but he has also read many others. One that he has read—and reread—is a 1999 book called A Better War, written by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. Sorley argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States could have won in Vietnam—if only the U.S. Congress hadn’t cut off military aid to South Vietnam.
Not surprisingly, the Sorley book is getting a lot of attention at the upper levels of the Pentagon and at McChrystal’s headquarters in Kabul. Told that NEWSWEEK was looking into the parallels between the Sorley book and General McChrystal’s situation in Afghanistan, a senior Marine general exclaimed, “You’re on to something there!” (Like other senior military officials contacted by NEWSWEEK, the general declined to be quoted praising a book that argues, though not in so many words, that the military was stabbed in the back by its civilian leaders.)
As he decides how to respond to McChrystal’s request for at least another 40,000 troops, President Obama has been reading some books, too. One that has caught the attention of some top advisers is Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein, recounting how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were not well advised on Vietnam. The very title of Goldstein’s book captures the conventional wisdom (at least at the center and left of the political spectrum) that Vietnam was a hopeless, unwinnable war.
But was it? The lessons of Vietnam are not necessarily the ones we glibly assume—chief among them that Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a quagmire, and that achieving some sort of victory is out of reach. Vietnam has become code for American hubris and inevitable military defeat. “What ifs” are always a risky exercise, but some good historians have suggested that there were two moments when victory—or at least a semblance of victory—was possible in America’s long war in Southeast Asia. The first came early, in 1965. Had Lyndon Johnson moved aggressively into Vietnam then—taking the war to the enemy and cutting off its supply routes into South Vietnam—the North Vietnamese might have backed off. The second fell five years later, when the military was finally having success with a new counterinsurgency strategy. Would more resources and more fighting later in the war have resulted in South Vietnam remaining independent of the communist North, leaving Vietnam divided in the manner of Korea? Some historians now say yes; many others still say no.
What makes the conversation about Sorley’s thesis especially interesting now, of course, is, as McChrystal asked Karnow, whether there is anything to be learned from Vietnam that would illuminate the way forward in Afghanistan. To be clear: there is no precise parallel to draw between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Every war is different. But the revisionists’ view of Vietnam does shed some light on the issues facing Obama about war leadership. The most surprising guidance Vietnam may have to offer is not that wars of this kind are unwinnable—which is clearly the common wisdom in America—but that they can produce victories if presidents resist the temptation to fight wars halfway or on the cheap. As President Eisenhower liked to say, if you fight, “you must fight to win.”
With their natural tendency to wage the last war, armies learn slowly. In World War II, American armed forces fought badly in Africa in 1942–43 and not so well in Italy in 1943–44 before getting it right in France and Germany in 1944–45. In Vietnam in 1965–67, the Americans pursued a misbegotten strategy of “search and destroy,” trying to fight an unconventional war with conventional forces that focused on “body counts” while the North Vietnamese more shrewdly infiltrated into towns and villages. Not until Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as U.S. commander in 1968 did the Americans smarten up and begin to fight a true counterinsurgency, focusing on protecting the population by a strategy of “clear and hold.” Instead of shoving aside the South Vietnamese Army, Abrams built up the local forces until they could stand and fight largely on their own—as they did in 1972, repulsing North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive with the aid of American airstrikes.
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But by then, as Sorley laments in A Better War, it was too late. American public opinion had turned. In 1973, President Nixon and the North Vietnamese signed a peace treaty that allowed Hanoi to keep 150,000 troops in South Vietnam, just waiting on orders to march. In 1974, breaking Nixon’s promises of continued support to Saigon, the U.S. Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Without logistical support or air cover, the South Vietnamese Army collapsed in 1975 and the communists swept into Saigon. Sorley quotes one of General Abrams’s closest colleagues, Gen. Bruce Palmer, as saying that Abrams “died [of cancer in 1974] feeling that we could have won the war. He felt we were on top of it in 1971, then lost our way.” Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon who worked with Abrams to turn the war around, felt the same: “We eventually defeated ourselves,” Bunker said.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces have also been slow learners. Ever since the Civil War, the American way of war was to overwhelm the enemy with superior firepower. Against the better-led but materially weaker Confederate Army, a war of attrition finally brought results for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who had been made commander by President Lincoln only after much trial and error by the Union Army. In Iraq, the learning curve again stretched out for years. After Vietnam, the Army adopted an approach known as the Powell doctrine that called for overwhelming force and a quick exit strategy. Forgotten was how to fight a counterinsurgency. At the outset of the Iraq War, U.S. forces overwhelmed the pitiful Iraqi Army—but then got bogged down in a guerrilla struggle. At last realizing the futility of superior “kinetics”—roughly speaking, putting a lot of metal in the air—American forces belatedly adopted a counterinsurgency strategy. Using a new field manual—FM 3-24, written under the supervision of Gen. David Petraeus—U.S. forces began to focus on protecting civilians while ruthlessly targeting jihadist leaders. The so-called surge, along with a vigorous effort to negotiate with Sunni enemies and bring them over to our side, worked. It bought the shaky Iraqi government breathing room to establish itself in relative peace. Still marred by violence, Iraq is nowhere near the all-out civil war that had long been predicted.
Now, in Afghanistan, McChrystal is implementing a strategy that draws on the lessons of Iraq—and looks an awful lot like the “pacification” program adopted by General Abrams in Vietnam in 1968. By ratcheting back the heavy use (and overuse) of firepower, McChrystal has reduced civilian casualties, which alienate the locals and breed more jihadists. At the same time, U.S. Special Operations Forces use the intelligence gleaned from friendly civilians to find and kill Taliban leaders. That is precisely what the Phoenix Program was designed to do 40 years ago in Vietnam: target and assassinate Viet Cong leaders. McChrystal is focusing on recruiting and training Afghan Army and police so they can take over the job of securing Afghanistan as soon as possible. “Afghanization” of the war is much the same as “Vietnamization,” the strategy adopted—successfully, Sorley argues—before Congress voted an end to aid to the South.
Cont’d
