Vietnamization of the War in Afghanistan

The Vietnamization of the Afghan War; President Obama Chooses a New ARVN Approach

On December the first, two-thousand nine, President Obama announced his long considered new policy for Afghanistan. The policy was an excellent political choice well tested by the brilliant inventor of the strategy, Richard Nixon. like his Presidential forerunner President Obama is planning to Vietnamize the Afghan war . President Nixon's Vietnamization policy to boost up the war while simultaneously withdrawing troops during his first term of office secured the largest landslide victory in U.S. history in 1972. President Obama's troop surge of 30,000 U.S. troops to make the total for Afghanistan 100,000 will be augmented by another 10,000 NATO troops in theory. President Obama's strategy to just borrow another half trillion dollar the next four years to fund the Afghanistan mission is certain to be popular with the military industrial complex as well.

President Obama, like Richard Nixon needs to expand the war in preparation for withdrawal.. Bombings in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam accomplished that purpose in the Vietnam war--Obama has decided to forego more bombing from the air and simply saturate Afghanistan in order to deter the 100 Al Qaeda troops-terrorist hidden in training there. The Taliban will be prevented from taking control of the corrupt central government--a vital investment by the United States in assuring that a puppet government can continue to exist after a U.S. troops withdrawal.

Afghanistan of course hasn't had a central government for most of its history. It is a poor rural high valley country with customary local rule by tribal authorities and strong men. Creating a strong central government may make it easier for corrupt dictatorships to rule over all of Iraq with greater efficiency in the future. Thus the comparisons of the Vietnamization of Iraq to the Vietnamization of Afghanistan are unfair--for Iraq is the nation with the most ancient history of central government while Afghanistan is a history without one. In fact much of the fierce Afghan resistance of foreign forces and central governance is an expression of the traditional rural hatred of oppressive governments seeking to increase there power.

There is a story about a Viet Cong recruitment tool in South Vietnam. The Viet Cong merely needed to explain to the rural people that they would be resisting the payment of taxed to Saigon. It was a sure way to win at least neutrality. Some opponents of the President's Vietnamization of Afghanistan policy have suggested that it might be better to be on the exterior lines supporting rural Afghanistan with clandestine support and pay benefits for far less overall cost then is presently scheduled. They would let the Taliban assume power in the cities and support a guerrilla resistance to attack them the next decade with occasional air support.

Others suggest that expanding the war into Pakistan would be a more Nixonian synthesis of the best of Johnsonian escalation with a simultaneous withdrawal strategy-plainly combining the best of L.B.J and ‘Dick’ Nixon’s war straggles is a kind of imitative brilliance that may bring the largest re-election victory in U.S. history. The only down side to the plan is that during the LBJ and Nixon years unemployment was quite low in the United States. Richard Nixon dealt with inflation with wage and price controls. President Obama is steadily increasing U.S. national debt to create a protracted supine national economic negotiating power for the people in order to assure that corporatist new world order design are advanced with least national resistance. He can stimulate an influx of cheap migrant Mexican labor any time the economy of the United States because good enough that the people become ‘uppity’ and consider increasing the taxes of the rich and trans-national corporations.

Nandering nabobs of negativism may dislike the Vietnamization of the Afghanistan war--rest assured that the war will continue long after President Obama has entered his second term at a cost of at least 50 billion dollars a year. There is no actual intelligence function in the White House or State Department that could imagine alternate, efficient and less costly methods of securing New York from destruction by covert terrorist mission planned abroad. President Obama may have the opportunity to expand the war into neighboring Iran in order to roll back reactionary Iranian ground forces angering by a U.S. strike to destroy Iranian nuclear weapons production at nuclear enrichment facilities plus. Plenty of opportunities for military glory shall abound and none for David Stockman style cost cutters and intelligent political-military strategists.

Afghan tribesmen have resisted foreign forces fighting in the high country for more than 30 centuries and so they shall continue that despicable lifestyle for perhaps the next two years more. Some prefer piece of course, yet with a majority of U.S. investments of a military sort that is a kind of violent social hallucination the prospects for a long range transformation of Afghanistan into a Euro-American N.A.T.O. friendly entity are dim, for they shall have an insufficient infrastructure to maintain the expense of a large central government authority independently of continued U.S. infusions of cash borrowed from China.

One day U.S. military actions will decrease through troop withdrawals as we await the thriving Afghan national economy to turn up its engine of opium production to enrich the government and pay for state dinners for western dignitaries. Then as the economy falters for lack of infrastructure innovation and development we shall send in more military forces borrowing cash from China to end the anarchy and terror of violence once again. That is going Richard M. Nixon one better.