Echoes can be seductive. But in the conduct of foreign policy, they can also be fatally misleading. History provides a sobering chronicle of leaders who listened to the wrong echoes.
The chorus is all but deafening in Afghanistan, scene of the Bush Administration’s first and longest military intervention, where President Obama has pledged to increase U.S. troop commitment from 32,000 to more than 60,000.
Afghanistan, many critics warn, is another Iraq. Others, reaching back further, call it “a new Vietnam,” a “quagmire” that will swallow up whatever remains of American credibility overseas.
“I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I would not see all of our conflicts…in the context of Vietnam,” said 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, speaking of Afghanistan. “Escape it as I might,” added Kerry, currently chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “the parallels just really keep leaping out.”
In fact, the parallels with both Iraq and Vietnam are outweighed by substantial differences. If any echoes fit, they sound from the Gulf War, the genocide in Rwanda and the civil war in Bosnia.
None of these precedents suggests that involvement in Afghanistan will be anything but painful. “It is going to be a long, difficult struggle,” predicts Obama’s special envoy there, Richard C. Holbrooke, who brokered the final peace accords in Bosnia.
But the consequences of turning away could be infinitely worse.
NEITHER IRAQ NOR VIETNAM
The U.S. debacles in Iraq and Vietnam carry two salient lessons: Beware of wildly exaggerated – or fraudulent – threats, and take no military action without firm international support.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was premised on “evidence” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and a clandestine hand in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 – evidence that later proved to be concocted by the Pentagon in a staged escalation to war.
Soo too in Indochina, where full-scale American intervention was justified by the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, a purported North Vietnamese naval assault on a U.S. destroyer in international seas. Four years later, a Congressional investigation found that the destroyer had sailed within a few miles of the coast, deep in Vietnamese territorial waters – and the attack had never occurred. By then, the United States was mired in a war that dragged on seven more years before it was finally lost, leaving 58,000 U.S. servicemen and more than 3 million Vietnamese dead.
In Vietnam and Iraq, the human cost of wars waged on outright deception was unforgivable – and all the more so because America’s closest friends saw the lies for what they were.
Apart from token deployments of South Korean, New Zealand and Australian troops, Washington was on its own in Vietnam, abandoned by its principal allies in Europe and Asia. In Iraq, British troops have augmented U.S. Army and Marine Corps personnel. But no other major power accepted the war’s premises. The “coalition of the willing” was largely an llusion.
From beginning to end, the situation is in stark contrast to the 1990 Gulf War, where the justification for a military response was self-evident. Sadaam’s assault on Kuwait posed an intolerable threat to the stability of global oil supplies. Troops from 34 nations participated in the subsequent invasion, including Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as well as Britain, France, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands and Sweden.
There are troops from 42 countries in Afghanistan today, among them all of the western nations that saw action in the 1990 conflict, six from the Muslim world and 19 former Soviet republics or communist satellites. It is the most internationalized conflict since World War II.
A GLOBAL CONSENSUS
Internationalization on that scale is rarely achieved. It implies widespread agreement on the need to intervene, and a de facto system of checks and balances.
The U.S. Department of Defence exercised sole command over the conflict in Indochina and the current war Iraq. But the peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan is under the auspices of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), established in 2001 by the United Nations Security Council, and implemented by NATO with the unanimous approval of its 26 member states. One of the largest NATO contingents on the ground represents Turkey, a Muslim nation that sat out the Gulf War.
There is a global consensus that Afghanistan’s role as a training ground for Al Qaeda, under the Taliban extremists who governed there from 1996 to the aftermath of September 11, has been documented beyond any doubt.
The motives for intervention are not clouded by the existence of massive oil reserves, as they are in Iraq, or by the ideological fixations that led Washington to view Vietnam as a proxy for Moscow and Beijing. They rise from a shared perception of threat, just as the menace to world energy supplies was a compelling justification for the Gulf War.
There is another, more controversial justification, driven by echoes from East Africa and the Balkans.
We owe it to the people of Afghanistan – and to our own belief in universal human rights – to stay on. Not on the present, half-hearted terms, with lax command controls that have resulted in tragic civilian casualties, or grossly inadequate troop levels. In every poll of public opinion, Afghans overwhelmingly express horror at the Taliban comeback. Their growing disgust with the intervention force is directed at its deadly mistakes, not its purpose.
We owe the Afghans a job done properly, and above all in their interest.
MEANINGFUL ECHOES
I won’t pretend to be objective in making this part of the case. Over five of the most harrowing years of my professional life, I worked as a reporter in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In July 1995, I was just a few miles from the town of Srebrenica, when 8,000 unarmed Bosnian men and boys were lined up, executed and hastily buried in muddy trenches. Along with a few other journalists, I spent the following weeks interviewing survivors, the wives and mothers who will never forget happened there. Nor will I.
The war in Bosnia went on, as it had for three years, unimpeded by the presence of 40,000 UN troops with no clear mandate to intervene and no weapons to match the heavy artillery, tanks and missiles of Serbian insurgents supplied by Belgrade.
What finally brought it to a halt, five months after Srebrenica, were U.S.-led NATO air strikes.
It hadn’t been easy for Bill Clinton to order those strikes. Echoes of Vietnam sounded even more loudly in 1995 than they do today. Like Clinton, I am a baby-boomer, come of age in the sixties and instinctively wary of military solutions to geopolitical problems.
But Bosnia’s echoes say that diplomacy is sometimes not enough – and more important, that moral obligations do bind us together in a single world. If we simply dismiss those obligations, when the evidence of brutality is unmistakable and the motives for intervention are unambiguous, where does it leave us?
In ex-Yugoslavia, the outside world intervened, poorly and to little effect for several years, but in the end it acted with conclusive force. The guns fell silent and thousands who might have died lived to begin rebuilding.
In 1994, the world turned its back completely on the slaughter of up to 800,000 Tutsi tribesmen in Rwanda by their Hutu neighbours.
“All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed in this unimaginable terror,” Clinton said on a 1998 visit to Rwanda, where he publicly apologized for his failure to approve military intervention.
I wonder if Bill Clinton – or Barack Obama – thinks of Rwanda when Afganistan is discussed, as I think of Bosnia when adolescent Afghan girls have acid thrown into their eyes because they have committed the unspeakable offense of attending school. I think of Bosnia when emergency aid workers are decapitated before video cameras. I thought about it when the Taliban carted their heavy guns to the Bamyan Valley and destroyed its 1,400-year-old statues of the Buddha, looking out over the ancient Silk Road that once made Afghanistan a cultural and economic link between Europe and China.
As a crime against humanity, it was not comparable to genocide, the blinding of children, public decapitations or suicide attacks like the one that killed or wounded at least 80 people in Kabul on February 10. But Bamyan is a powerful symbol of the darkness behind them, and a warning of what can happen when darkness is allowed to deepen and spread.
STRATEGIC CONCERNS
The world’s failure to react in Rwanda echoes today in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Hutu-Tutsi conflict was exported and rages on. A year ago, the International Rescue Committee, an international humanitarian organization, estimated that 5.4 million people have died from war-related causes in Congo since 1998.
The Congo marks a ghastly meeting point between the world’s forgotten moral obligations and its common strategic concerns. The Rwandan genocide began as an isolated tribal massacre. But its dismal meaning – “the world doesn’t care” – helped spark a conflagration that has since swept beyond the Congo over parts of Kenya and Uganda, across the Darfur region of Sudan and into the eastern half of Chad. Some call it “Africa’s first world war.”
Afghanistan is another such point. Taliban offshoots now control large swaths of Pakistan’s frontier provinces, and scattered districts far from the Afghan border on the road to India. The price of turning away is not merely a blank check for the extremism that made 9/11 possible, but an immense expansion of its reach.
That alone, apart from any moral issues, is enough to explain why 42 nations have contributed troops to the U.N. force.
They – and the very concept of international peacekeeping – face a critical test in the coming months. “If this year we don’t turn the tide, it’s going to be much harder later on,” says Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland, which has deployed 1,600 soldiers in Afghanistan.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5