Today is the day the president explains his historic error to the American people and in the process assures all by his cowardice why he will be a one-term president. He took two months to make the exactly the same decision that Bush could have made in two minutes.
(2 from today’s Financial Times)
Veterans of Soviet war see same errors by US
By Charles Clover in Moscow
Published: November 30 2009 17:29 | Last updated: November 30 2009 17:29
It was May 1985 when General Igor Rodionov stepped off a military transport aircraft at Kabul airport, assuming command of the Soviet Union’s 40th Army fighting in Afghanistan.
His now-creased face tells the ensuing story better than words. He was the fifth of seven Soviet commanders, sharing a place in history with a singular brotherhood: foreign generals sent to conquer Afghanistan. The line, stretching from Alexander the Great to the present day, is distinguished by one conspicuous characteristic – all ultimately failed.
One not very optimistic piece of advice he wishes to share with those treading in his footsteps is this: “Everything has already been tried.”
On the eve of an expected decision by the US administration to commit thousands more soldiers to the struggle against the Taliban, Gen Rodionov and other Soviet veterans feel a mixture of Schadenfreude and sympathy for the latest foreign invaders in the mountainous land they left in 1989 after a bloody 10-year counter-insurgency.
From his base in the sumptuous Tajbeg palace, on a commanding hill on the outskirts of Kabul, Gen Rodionov quickly learned “there was no front. The bullets could come from anywhere”.
The Soviet 40th Army comprised 120,000 troops at the height of the war, and operations focused on manoeuvring helicopter-borne paratroopers on to mountains, to control high ground, and then moving tanks through the valleys.
In a decade nearly 15,000 Soviet troops lost their lives – and hundreds of thousands of Afghans – in many of the same places that US forces and their allies are struggling to control today: the border regions in the south-east of the country near Pakistan, and the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand.
“The war, all 10 years of it, went in circles. We would come and they [the insurgents] would leave. Then we leave, and they would return,” Gen Rodionov said.
Other former senior Soviet officers see a similar futility in US efforts in Afghanistan.
“More soldiers is simply going to mean more deaths,” said Gennady Zaitsev, former commander of the KGB’s elite Alpha commando unit, which took part in some of the most critical operations of the war.
“US and British citizens are going to ask, quite rightly, ‘why are our sons dying?’ And the answer will be ‘to keep Hamid Karzai [the Afghan president] in power’. I don’t think that will satisfy them.”
For Gen Rodionov, the news emanating from the conflict is disturbingly familiar.
“They [the US and its allies] have to understand that there is no way for them to succeed militarily. The only way is politics. And Karzai has no popularity amongst the people, he just runs a mafia.”
Relations between the Afghan people and the Soviets determined the outcome of the war, Gen Rodionov believes. “It was a social, a political problem which we utterly failed to grasp with our military mindset,” he said.
Like the Nato forces, the Soviets had a honeymoon for one to two years after their 1979 invasion. Infrastructure projects went ahead – most of the high-rise buildings in Kabul are Soviet even now. But then, as Gen Rodionov remembered, around 1982 things drastically worsened.
“Of course the problem was the same – the 40th army was a highly armed and trained force. It answered every shot directed at them with 10 shots. They created many casualties among civilians.
“We would bomb a village because there were one or two Mujahideen there. Women and children would die and this created the insurgent movement. It was a classic partisan war.”
Russia’s Afghanistan veterans say the US is in danger of winning militarily but losing politically, echoing their own experience.
Pyotr Suslov, a former operative for a KGB special operations unit in Afghanistan, said Nato’s main mistake was in not paying proper attention to the balance between Afghanistan’s tribes, particularly the Pashtun, who make up just under half of the population.
Instead, the US focused its initial attention on the Tajik-led Northern Alliance, the guerrilla movement that swept the Taliban from power in 2001 with US backing.
“They ignored the Pashtun,” said Mr Suslov. “The Northern Alliance was in power after the Taliban fell, they were just a bunch of different commanders, all different tribes, ethnicities. The Pashtun were ignored. That is where the problem has come from. It is important for the US to agree with the Pashtun tribes.”
Gen Rodionov said he had come to Afghanistan harshly critical of the war, and his criticism only grew throughout his term.
During this time, senior officers, watching the futility of their methods, began openly to discuss withdrawal. “It was a very narrow circle at first, and then it grew. The attitude at the time of the withdrawal was simply ‘we should have done it earlier’.”
Decision-making echoes LBJ’s 1965 escalation
By Jurek Martin in Washington
Published: November 30 2009 17:40 | Last updated: November 30 2009 17:40
There are probably as many differences as similarities between the US wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But the parallels in the decision-making processes of two presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson and Barack Obama, as they contemplated escalation in the respective conflicts are striking.
In 1965 as today deliberations were protracted, lasting months and, a few leaks apart, mostly closely held. Both policy teams had more hawks than doves and both had field commanders wanting more troops but neither promising success. Both presidents were deeply ambivalent, neither wanting to sacrifice ambitious domestic agendas on the altars of war in far-off lands.
Mr Obama, unveiling his new strategy on Tuesday night, must be feeling as LBJ did in the summer of 1965 in deciding to send 44 more battalions to Vietnam. He resists the comparison, saying in a September interview: “You have to learn lessons from history. On the other hand, each historical moment is different. You never step in the same river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.”
Yet both spoke about “finishing the job” in struggles – against communism then and terrorism now – amid fears of a domino effect on neighbouring states.
The current principal doves are Joe Biden, the vice-president who is convinced that US and Nato troops should focus on training Afghan forces, and Karl Eikenberry, US ambassador in Kabul and previously a commander in the field. Then, it was George Ball, the under-secretary of state – like Mr Biden more steeped in European affairs, with a powerful intellect to boot.
On July 21 1965, Ball drew on his experience watching the futile seven-year French struggle in Indochina in his pithy – and prophetic – summation of the case for not escalating in Vietnam: “We won’t get out. We’ll double our bet and end up lost in the rice paddies.”
He was outnumbered, as Mr Biden is today. Stacked against him were Robert McNamara, the defence secretary, and his field commander William Westmoreland, Dean Rusk, secretary off state, McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser, and his brother Bill, also at the state department.
In the Obama team, Robert Gates may be less gung-ho than McNamara – as, arguably, is General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan than Westmoreland – but both are committed to continuing the mission. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, is known not to want to leave Afghan women to the stone-age mercies of the Taliban again. James Jones, at the National Security Council, sees his role more as a policy co-ordinator than architect.
Outside the policy chambers, opposition to the Vietnam war had not reached critical mass in 1965 any more than now. Dissent existed, mostly on the left, as today, but it was only after LBJ reinstated the military draft in 1965-66 that it reached, decisively, into the middle classes and campuses. Nobody is talking about bringing back the draft for Afghanistan, where US troop presence is but one tenth of its Vietnam peak.
Nor had the establishment media yet turned against the war in 1965, again replicated today, even if the mainstream press is now less influential. Joe Alsop, the powerful and jingoistic Washington columnist, was the principal advocate of escalation in Vietnam, going after Ball (“his knowledge of Asia could be comfortably contained in a fairly small thimble”) with a vitriol that current critics of Mr Obama, such as Dick Cheney, former vice-president, and the rightwing commentariat, struggle to emulate.
But there were, and are, other voices, too. George Aiken, the Vermont Republican senator, pronounced of Vietnam: “We should declare victory and get out.”
In urging Mr Obama to do the same in Afghanistan even if it costs him a second term, Garry Wills, a leading historian and admirer of this president, wrote in the New York Review of Books recently: “Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road [citing LBJ and Richard Nixon] are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.”
