Dan Shafer's Blog

During his speech tonight from West Point, President Obama took issue with those like me who suggest that there are useful and eerie parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan. He made two principal counter-arguments, neither of which holds water.

First, he said that unlike in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan has the backing of a broad coalition of other nations (he claimed 43 in all) endorsing the rightness of America's position. That argument fails on several grounds:

• The "coalition" of NATO forces in Afghanistan is a token force to which nations for the most part grudgingly contribute small contingents only because of their treaty obligations. Their presence does not constitute an endorsement of our policies.
• In Vietnam, we actually had a smaller coalition but the forces sent by Korea, Canada and Australia, among others, were substantial in size, fully engaged and signs of support from their governments, however sadly misplaced.
• The presence or absence of a coalition of forces does not justify or condemn any war. A war is not more just because its initiator can convince other countries to support it any more than it is necessarily unjust if it can't drum up such support. War is never the answer to an intelligent question.

Second, he said that Afghanistan is not a popular uprising, implying that Vietnam was such a war. While it is true that there were some elements of the Vietnamese population who supported the Saigon government  and its U.S. allies and supporters, the vast majority of the country was not involved in any popular uprising. The North Vietnamese created the Viet Cong and in many ways were its puppet masters just as we were for the RVN government. There was not broad public support, let alone what could be characterized as a popular uprising that supported reunification with North Vietnam. In both cases, the percentage of the people committed to or even more than remotely interested in the war was almost certainly under 5% and probably less than 1%.

I disagree with Obama's decision as much as I disagree with his historical understanding. I also do not believe he will be successful in getting us out of Afghanistan by July 2011 or even starting any significant drawdown of troops there in that time frame.

Dig in, folks. It's gonna get uglier.