Afghanistan is just the latest example of how poorly we grasp war

As the Afghan government collapsed, journalists began searching American history for precedents to this colossal failure. They settled on perhaps the obvious: The fall of Saigon, which ended the Vietnam War in 1975.

In both cases, the United States created, nurtured, manipulated and financed a national government that fell apart under pressure from a highly motivated opposition. These governments were alien to the people whom they ruled. These governments were kleptocracies. These governments had well-armed armies that suffered thousands of casualties but were no match for their opponents.

In looking back on the Vietnam War, several journalists mentioned David Halberstam’s best-seller “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), which chronicled American involvement in Vietnam from the close of World War II through 1968 — the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Halberstam labeled the Harvard, Yale and West Point men who directed America’s Vietnam War the best and the brightest.

Halberstam used the phrase ironically; now, it is used derisively. Nobody today wants to be called one of the best and the brightest.

The best and brightest knew little about Southeast Asia. Most had never been there until the United States went to war. But they believed the domino theory that if South Vietnam fell to communists, so would the surrounding nations — countries as far away as South Korea. And they believed once we turned the full might of the American war machine on the communists, they would sue for peace.

At a meeting of generals, admirals and military bureaucrats — including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — in Hawaii in 1965, the best and brightest accepted Gen. William Westmoreland’s request to expand the ground war in South Vietnam. He needed more troops than the 33,500 he had in the country, he explained, to grind down the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. This was his first large troop request. By 1967, when I graduated from college, he had 465,000 Americans in the field.

After the meeting adjourned, a spokesman for the group talked to reporters. He was asked how long the war would last.

He replied “Six months.”

There really is no comparison between the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan war except for their ignominious endings — and the suffering of civilians caught between warring parties. More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. So far, American service member deaths in Afghanistan number close to 2,500. The Vietnam War shook our nation to its foundations. It not only challenged the culture, it changed the culture. The Afghan tragedy has had no such influence as yet, although it has had a profound effect on the families and friends of those who died there.

A century ago, the English poet Edmund Bluden wrote a memoir of his service on the Western Front during World War I. Late in the war, Bluden reports, a green young soldier, just arrived in the trenches from England, asked an old sergeant “Who’s winning?” The sergeant answered: “The war is winning. And will keep on winning.”

Those who made the American wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan never asked an old sergeant what he knew.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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