The Unlearned Lessons of the Past
During the Vietnam War, our military and political leaders assured the American public that the only way to defeat the Vietcong was to cut off their supply lines running through Cambodia. Even before President Nixon’s televised address where he sought to justify a military incursion into the “Parrot’s Beak” area of Cambodia, the Secret Forces, the CIA directly and through its privately owned airline, Air America, was already conducting covert operations on a massive scale. Since Cambodia cannot secure its own borders, so went the logic, we have to do it for them, and in the process save Cambodia, or so the logic went.
The result was that (a) the Ho Chi Minh trail was never really disrupted and supplies continued to flow through Camboda; and (b) we supported the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, and installed our own puppet, Lon Nol. The further consequence is that a+b led to C – the total collapse of Cambodia, the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the killing fields which led to the slaughter of one-third of the Cambodian population.
Flash forward to the present. We cannot control the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and have therefore expanded the war into Pakistan. The Pakistan government has become de-stabilized and it has led to the present leaders in Pakistan entering into an agreement with the Taliban leaders in the border region allowing the imposition of radical Shari’a law into that region. Emboldened, the Taliban supporters of radical Islam are now moving into an area only 60 miles from Islamabad. The response of the U.S. government is reminiscent of a similar response made decades ago in regard to the Camodian-Vietnam border. We must save Pakistan from itself. This has led to President Obama’s eerily similar decision to that of President Nixon, let’s escalate the military activities and increase the number of U.S. forces in the border region. Let’s not work through the Afghan or Pakistani officials in that region, but we must do it by ourselves and not consult them. And, in lieu of the Vietnamization of the Vietnam Army we will now have the Afghanization and Pakistanization of these respective military forces so they can do their own fighting. Scarily familiar and it will lead to the same results.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Pakistan does possess nuclear weapons and the destabilization of Pakistan, already under way, will not be tolerated by India. A Islamic militant state, armed with nuclear weapons, on its border is a threat to the national security of India. Is Mr. Obama prepared for a major war in South Asia ?
Mr. Colin Powell has long argued that one of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War is that before one commences military actions, there also has to be in place an exit strategy. It is clear that there is no exit strategy in place for either Afghanistan or Pakistan – nation building is not an exit strategy. It is equally clear that the lessons of the Vietnam War have never been learned and we are heading down the same road.
Is Afghanistan this generation’s Vietnam, and will Pakistan become this generation’s “killing fields” ?
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