Obama's Vietnam

The war in Afghanistan never ceases to amaze. It continues to demand ever-greater human and material resources, even as talk of victory is receding. The situation cannot help, but remind us of the Vietnamese quagmire in which the U.S. got stuck from 1963 until 1975. In both cases, part of the problem lay in the vagueness of the stated war aims, and of the type of victory those aims required.

Things should become clearer between now and March 31st. American President Barack Obama will have to make his views clear before the United Nations conference at The Hague on the war in Afghanistan, and indeed the NATO summit to be held shortly afterwards.

For the time being, the United States’ war aims are those stated by Obama during his visit to Canada: to protect his country from any terrorist attack which might be launched from Afghan territory. He went further in an interview with the New York Times a few days ago, when he admitted that the war in Afghanistan could not be won and that it would be necessary to negotiate with “moderate Taliban.”

To some extent this is a return to the situation 10 years ago, before September 11th, 2001, when it was unclear whether the Taliban was part of the problem in Afghanistan or part of the solution. After September 11th, America’s war aims were formulated by the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said that the “war on terrorism” would be won when the United States felt secure again.

Powell’s war aims were only slightly more vague than those of Obama. But in Powell’s day there was no room for “moderate Taliban.” At that time all the talk was of “regime change” to bring democracy to the Middle East, starting with Iraq.

The search for “moderate Taliban” could turn out to be just as fraught as the policy of “regime change” had been. The debate over “moderate Taliban” among experts in the United States is extraordinarily complex. There is plenty of room for mistakes, in this policy as in the previous one.

War aims are by their very nature difficult to define or put into order, as are the strategies which flow from them. In the case Vietnam, historians have identified at least 22 war aims.

The war in Afghanistan is bound to change and intensify during the coming months. In fact it is doing so already.

On this issue of identifying the enemy, Barack Obama’s position is comparable to a certain extent to that of Lyndon B Johnson in 1965 when he ordered the first major escalation of the war in Vietnam . Johnson had in fact been re-elected the previous year on the promise that he would curtail the war, and perhaps even withdraw his country from it altogether. He was partly counting on the mistaken and short-lived belief that moderate South Vietnamese communists could be split from their North Vietnamese brothers. In the end it was the latter who became the sole focus. The debate over the nature and identity of the enemy in Vietnam was just as complex and bitter as that about the Taliban today. Johnson’s Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, had argued that it was impossible to distinguish hardliners from moderates among the Vietnamese communists, and that it was only on that basis that the war could be won. To a certain extent that debate of 1964 resembled last autumn’s debate between Obama and John McCain.

Obama has made the Afghan front the “central front” of the war against terrorism. That in itself is an escalation. But he is more concerned to divide the enemy than to defeat it, in order to limit his country’s involvement and perhaps even to bring it to an end – so perhaps it is not an escalation after all. It all depends on whether these various signs and messages are to be taken as complementary or contradictory.