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U.S. headed for Vietnam War-like disaster in Afghanistan, two experts warn

U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and Afghanistan

By Colin Perkel / Canadian Press

TORONTO — The United States is being dragged into a bloody Vietnam War-like morass because of a misguided obsession with establishing a national government in Kabul and its military failure to protect rural Afghans, a new analysis concludes.

Prof. Tom Johnson says the only chance of success the Americans might have would be to adopt on a grand scale Canada's "model village" approach, such as the one in Deh-e Bagh.

"Our suggestion is basically a simultaneous swarm of 200 Deh-e Baghs," Johnson, who helped forge Canada's military approach in Afghanistan, told The Canadian Press.

"It is the only way to make the Taliban irrelevant."

In a paper published in the November/December issue of the Military Review journal, Thomas and co-author Chris Mason argue Afghans will never support the government of President Hamid Karzai - not only because of the taint of corruption surrounding him.

A Western-style democracy is something Afghans simply won't accept, they write, because the central government has no religious or dynastic underpinnings.

"The notion that the West can apply it to Afghan society like a coat of paint is simply wishful thinking," the paper states.

"The Karzai government is illegitimate because it is elected."

The analysis draws sobering parallels to the U.S. failure to win in Vietnam 50 years ago and its current efforts in Afghanistan, where casualties and attacks have mounted to record levels despite a surge in American troops.

Rather than having learned from the mistakes that led to its ignominious defeat at the hands of the Viet Cong, the U.S. has engaged in an exact "political and military re-enactment" of the Vietnam War.

"The current dual-pronged strategy of nation building from the non-existent top down and a default war of attrition is leading us down the same tragic path," the authors write.

As in Vietnam, coalition forces are battling a rural-based, ethnically cohesive insurgency in an overwhelmingly illiterate country whose geography makes conventional fighting all but impossible.

But if the enemy in Vietnam was monolithic, the battle in Afghanistan is against several connected insurgencies, according to the paper.

"By misunderstanding the basic nature of the enemy, the United States is fighting the wrong war again, just as we did in Vietnam," the article states.

The paper argues that Afghanistan districts and geographical boundaries represent the political and economic reach of an area's leading clan.

International forces need to attach themselves to a leading family to allow their influence to expand and cover the entire district and push the Taliban out, Johnson said.

"Village consensus in Afghanistan is key and the Taliban realize this," he said.

"(But) the swarm is critical - dribbling them in onesies and twosies won't cut it."

The professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, who has a quarter century of experience studying and working in Afghanistan, captured the attention of Canada's outgoing commander in Kandahar, Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance last year.

Leaning heavily on Johnson's thinking, Vance made the model-village approach integral to his mission, supporting village populations by offering security and employment for small-scale projects.

While the approach won praise from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American soldier in Afghanistan, he has opted mostly to leave critical rural areas to try to defend larger urban centres.

The paper also criticizes provincial reconstruction team efforts - a key civilian-military focus for Canada in Kandahar - on the grounds that "they are simply too few and far between."

Mason served in 2005 as political officer for a provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Advanced Defence Studies in Washington, D.C.