By way of a partial summary, here's what Publishers Weekly said about Kaiser's book:
This masterpiece of governmental history locates the roots of the Vietnam War not in the Johnson or even Kennedy administration, but back in the military policies of the Eisenhower era. Eisenhower and his advisors took an aggressive attitude--including an openness to using nuclear weapons toward communist advances anywhere, "especially in Southeast Asia," Kaiser finds. Neutralist, nonaligned governments in emerging nations, such as in Laos, were treated as enemies; Kennedy was more open to nonaligned governments and more interested in detente than in war. But the positions of the Eisenhower administration were entrenched institutionally among both civilian and military advisors in the State and Defense Departments.
Drawing on a host of documents from recently opened government archives and tape recordings of White House meetings, Kaiser offers voluminous and meticulous evidence that Kennedy repeatedly rejected, deferred or at least modified recommendations for military actions, most notably in Laos. Misled by aides into thinking we were winning in Vietnam, even after Diem's overthrow, Kennedy never aggressively redirected policy there. President Johnson, less skilled than Kennedy in foreign affairs, readily reverted to Eisenhower's narrow policy framework, despite the emergence of critics among his advisers whose thinking echoed Kennedy's. Kaiser repeatedly says they ignored problems they couldn't solve and failed to heed clear evidence that their assumptions were flawed, making defeat a foregone conclusion. This is a commanding work that sheds bright light on questions of responsibility for the Vietnam debacle.
The book actually recounts how we were quite close to heading into war over Laos before Kennedy took office, and steered us away, establishing a neutral government which he considered a victory, given the proximity of Red China. It argues that Kennedy would have been quite content with a similar arrangement in Vietnam.
The parallels here should be obvious: a more nuanced, diplomatically inclined Democrat follows a more conventional Republican, and seeks to reverse the dynamic of increased militarism in Asia. He likes a more diversified approach, is willing to support domestic military efforts, but places his bets on US advisors and special forces rather than ground troops, thinking that he's sealing himself off from the all out war he sees no point or profit in.
And, of course, the very command continuity that has Versailles swooning over Obama is precisely the problem, given this history. Other views are readily available, of course. Tough not, it would seem, where they are needed most. In quick hits, RandomNonviolence points to the odd couple of Tom Hayden and former CIA point man on Osama bin Ladin, Michael Scheuer. From Hayden's original:
The hard choices are laid out very clearly in writings by the CIA's former point man on Osama bin Ladin, Michael Scheuer, who also ran the Agency's rendition program and still supports it. Scheuer is a tough guy, in other words, who says the options are either to kill all the jihadists, make it quick, and withdraw [not a real option], or begin pursuing an agenda which addresses what he calls Muslim issues: the American military and civilian presence in the Arab Peninsula, the unqualified US support for Israel, US support for states which oppress Muslims [China, India, Russia], US exploitation of Muslim oil and suppression of its price, US military presence in the Islamic world, US support and protection of Arab police states. [Michael Scheuer, Marching Toward Hell, 2008]
Such an approach would create an option to violence for many millons of jihadi sympathizers and potential recruits. It would create an incentive not to inflict terrorism, blow up airplanes and hotels, or deploy a nuclear bomb in a suitcase. It would disturb the multinational oil companies and the Israel lobby, but open a better path to stability than wars against the Muslim world.
RandomNonviolence links to other alternative views as well, but I'd like to pick up on an oldier piece, written in the immediate aftermath of Obama's election by Sameer Dossani at Foreign Policy In Focus, "The Case for U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan". What this piece provides is a clear and deep case for an alternative approach.
Dossani starts with drawing a clear distinction between two contrasry conceptions of justice: Martin Luther King's and George Bush's:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, "Wanted: Dead or Alive".
- George W. Bush
He goes on to say that Obama will have to chose between these two when he takes office, and I think it's fair to say that Obama, characteristically, had tried to choose one from Column "A" and one from column "B". But, unfortunately, just like JFK before him, the advisors are almost entirely stacked under column "B".
In the next section of the article, Dossani provides a poignant insight into the Afghani perspective, recounting some major events of recent history, and how they are commonly viewed:
After the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration portrayed the Taliban as deeply connected with al-Qaeda, the terrorist network that claimed responsibility for the attacks, and therefore argued for going to war against Afghanistan. When the Taliban countered that they were happy to give up Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, if the U.S. could produce any evidence for the allegation, the U.S. scoffed. Then the U.S. invaded.
The invasion succeeded in two things: First, it brought down a terrible fundamentalist regime while taking an inordinately heavy toll in civilian causalities. The Taliban had instituted a brutal form of shariah law and forced minorities to wear identification tags. They had even destroyed ancient Buddhist carvings claiming that the depiction of the human form is "unislamic." Many Afghans - particularly the half of the population who happen to be women - were excited to see the Taliban ousted. While this is an accomplishment, it's worth remembering that expectations for improvement in women's lives were largely unmet.
The second and even more dangerous accomplishment of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was to elevate the Taliban, al-Qaeda and anyone willing to resist U.S. aggression to the status of heroes or freedom fighters.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand what most Afghans and many South Asians, Muslims, and others around the world felt after the invasion is to remember how Americans felt after the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush was a deeply unpopular president. The election that brought him to power had split the population, with shady dealings in Florida and an activist Supreme Court ultimately deciding the race in favor of Bush. Many of my liberal compatriots despised the president, who was already acquiring a reputation for spending his presidency on vacation.
But after the 9/11 attacks, those same liberals were rallying around Bush. The logic was simple: in a time of crisis, with your country under attack, you support those who are going to defend you. You may not like George W. Bush, but his policies his armed forces stand between you and whoever caused significant damage to New York and Washington, DC.
By the same logic, who stood between Afghan civilians and the NATO aerial bombardments that killed about 3,000 people? The Taliban. Every bomb that detonated on a wedding party led to tens, perhaps hundreds of young people - mostly young boys and many of them orphans - joining the resistance movement under the flag of the Taliban.
And it's not just that the Afghan population believes that the Taliban resistance is legitimate; that resistance is legitimate under international law. No less important a document than the United Nations charter gives the Taliban and other Afghans the right to legitimate self-defense against U.S. aggression.
It bears noting that there's nothing terribly remarkable about the insight here--although it is very well expressed. Far more remarkable is the lack of such insight amongst America's political elites. The parallels Dossani draws between Afghani and US attitudes are obvious enough, and similar enough to similar dynamics in Irag that under-educated 20-year old American troops in the field have had no such problem making the connection.
Why can't US political elites see something this obvious? There are a number of reasons, but one of them is something I intend to take up at greater length later this weekend, and that's the narcissistic incapacity for empathy. It only takes a very minimal amount of empathy to be able to see the parallels that Dossani points to--at least to grasp their general outlines. We're not talking about the deeper sort of empathy that actually shares any of their feelings, just the bare minimal amount necessary to recognize the parallels. Even that bare minimum is commonly beyond the capacity of the diagnosed narcissist, one who would formally be identified as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). And when it comes to our foreign policy establishment, this is not the only example of broadly-shared NPD-like thinking. Indeed, such thinking is, broadly speaking, more the rule than the exception, when dealing with dark-skinned non-European people. And it is also clearly a recipe for unmitigated failure. For if we cannot understand other people as fundamentally similar to ourselves, we will never be able to find a way to live with them.
Of course there are profound cultural differences. And there's a deep need to provide an alternative to narrowness of the fundamentalist vision. Dossani addresses this directly in the next section of the article:
In 1999 I was the first staff person of the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan, a group that was combating "honor crimes" along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. These were incidences of domestic violence, often against a wife, a sister, a daughter or even a mother who was accused of having some kind of illicit sexual relationship. We understood that these crimes were on the rise because of the spread of Taliban-style Wahabi Islam into tribal areas that already had an extremely patriarchal view of women's bodies.
What was our weapon of choice in fighting against the Talibanization of what has traditionally been a tolerant, ecumenical form of Islam? Education. We taught women their rights under Pakistani and Afghani law, we taught about the passages in the Quran that mentioned women's rights, and we also tried to educate people about other traditions - whether they be secular humanist traditions or the Hindu and Christian traditions of neighboring countries and tribes. In other words we tried to undermine the hatred, the xenophobia, the fear upon which fundamentalism is built.
Such efforts may take generations, and they almost always require the state to play a role in education, development and ensuring employment for all. But ultimately education is the only way to combat religious fundamentalism, just as negotiation is ultimately the only way to end war.
This is not the sort of solution that America's instant-gratification society likes to hear about. But it beats the hell out of decades of abject failure, doing the same stupid things over and over and over again, in slightly different dress.
How does such a perspective translate into advice for an Afghanistan policy? Further down, Dossani lays it out:
Instead of scaling up an already disastrous war, the United States could change course in a way that would ultimately do a lot more to ensure the world's safety. Such measures should include:
1. Withdrawing troops. International law is clear on this subject. No country may occupy another indefinitely and certainly not without the will of the people being occupied. If an Obama administration truly thinks that withdrawing U.S. and NATO troops would be a bad thing for Afghans, hold a referendum to see who would like the troops to remain.
2. Working with the various Afghan factions to begin negotiations. Wars are rarely stopped on the battlefield, and those that are have a tendency to break out again after a few years. The recent history of Afghanistan illustrates this point. It's better by far for enemies and friends, Pashtun, Tajik, and others to settle differences through negotiation based on mutual respect and the rule of law.
3. Once stability and security are guaranteed in Afghanistan, beginning the attack on fundamentalism in earnest. Working to incorporate Afghanistan into the international human rights framework through enforcing UN measures which Afghanistan has already ratified, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is one step that can be taken in this regard. Another is major investment in social infrastructure and particularly health and education measures which will ultimately help Afghanistan recover from being bombed "into the stone age."
If the idea of immediately stopping all military operations in Afghanistan sounds radical, it shouldn't. No less than President Hamid Karzai pleaded for an end to the bombings immediately after the U.S. election, as yet another wedding party fell victim to bombs from the sky.
For the sake of all us, Afghan and American, let's hope President Barack Obama heeds his call.
Of course, this is not what Obama has chosen to do. He has, instead, chosen very JFK-like approach, one that seems reasonable and nuanced--and that, indeed, is reasonable and nuanced compared to what came before it... at least if you ignore international law, and actual Afghan people themselves. For this is what passes as reasonable and nuanced within the circles of elite foreign policy opinion. And the proof of this is that Obama has now succeeded in eliciting European support.
Unfortunately, this is not just not enough. Not even close. It is, at least potentially, every bit as dangerous as JFK's Vietnam policy. We should not forget that America had the broad support of its allies when it started out in Vietnam. It took years for our allies' elites to realize how badly wrong we had gone, and by then, nothing they could do could stop us.
What's needed is for Obama actions to match his words. He needs to include the views of all in his decisionmaking process. The views of all--and not just the Establishment's self-selected "best and brightest", the sort who brought us the Vietnam War in the first place. |
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