ATTACHED COLUMN BY JAMES BAYNE EITHER GET IN OR GET OUT—-NO MORE ATTRITION
Those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. For some I am preaching to the choir but others seem to have forgotten the mistakes we have made in a number of international arenas. In this space last week I wrote of what I see as the similarities of gradual deepening of involvement in the internal affairs of an independent nation. We have done it time and again. One of our great presidents, James Monroe, gave us the Monroe Doctrine which said, in essence, to the rest of the world “stay the hell out of the affairs here in the western hemisphere”. In my opinion we should follow that advice with the respect to the affairs elsewhere. But should any other nation dare to attack our people, our embassies, or the legal interests of our citizens then we should take whatever action is necessary to inflict maximum punishment on them and we needn’t waste time with the United Nations.
What I see is a parallelism, by our involvement in Afghanistan, with our mistakes in Vietnam. Let us briefly look at the Vietnam era. We became overtly involved in 1962 when President Kennedy established the Military Assistance Command of Vietnam (MACV) and sending 1000 military advisors to aid the South Vietnamese. Within a year that force grew to 15,000. In 1963 we were misled about the success we were having and in August, 1963 we (the CIA and the US Ambassador in Saigon) secretly plotted to overthrow the existing government of South Vietnam. That overthrow occurred in November. After President Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson vowed to keep Kennedy’s efforts going. He replaced General Paul Harkins as commander of MACV with General William Westmoreland who pushed for an additional 200,000 troops. However Johnson kept the status quo until it was reported that two US destroyers were attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin (gunboats against destroyers?). Johnson asked the US Congress for authority (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to “take all necessary actions to protect US interests in Vietnam”. Congress passed the resolution with only two dissenting votes out of the 535 members. In the elections of the fall of 1964 Johnson pledged that “American boys would not be called upon to do the job that Asian boys should do”. But by June of 1965 we had 75,000 troops there and the next month another 100,000 were sent and another 100,000 were approved to go in the following year. Westmoreland embarked on a program of “seek and destroy” believing that he could wear down the North Vietnamese through attrition. When your supply base is half a world away believing in attrition of the enemy seems a folly. We became the victims of attrition in Vietnam and at home.
It seems to me that we are on a similar course in Afghanistan. We started with advisors, then a few troops, then we replaced the commanding general (maybe we should have—I just hope that was a military decision and not a political one), we’ve doubled the troops, and the new commander is saying he needs more troops. Today it is reported that Admiral Mullin (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff) is lobbying for yet another increase in troops. I see the same mistakes being made again.
