Obama’s Vietnam

It's still too early to say exactly what President Obama will do in Afghanistan. But there are some signs—difficult to read with certainty, yet nonetheless suggestive—that reality is sinking in, at least in some important corners of the new administration. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the one Bush cabinet holdover, worries that increasing the size of the U.S. military's footprint in Afghanistan will merely fan the locals' antipathy toward foreigners. "We need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan," he told a congressional committee last week. "My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of the problem, rather than as part of the solution. And then we are lost."

Vietnam, half a world away, seemed alien to many Americans and to Westerners generally. Afghanistan might as well be the moon. At least Vietnam had been a French colony, albeit a troubled one. Afghanistan resisted colonization, dispatching 19th-century British and 20th-century Russian soldiers with equal efficiency. "Afghanistan is not a nation, it is a collection of tribes," according to a Saudi diplomat who did not wish to publicly disparage a Muslim neighbor. In Vietnam, the Ngo Dinh Diem government was seen as illegitimate because Diem was a Roman Catholic in a mostly Buddhist country and because it was propped up by the United States. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai's government was essentially created by the United States after local warlords, backed by American airpower, ousted the Taliban in 2001. (Karzai was elected in his own right in 2004, but at a time when he was clearly favored by America and faced no serious rivals.)

As in Diem's Vietnam, government corruption is epic; even Karzai says so. "The banks of the world are full of the money of our statesmen," he said last November. His former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, rates his old government as "one of the five most corrupt in the world" and warns that Afghanistan is becoming a "failed, narco-mafia state." In a country where seven out of 10 citizens live on about a dollar a day, the average family each year must pay about $100 in baksheesh, or bribes (in Vietnam, this was known as "tea" or "coffee" money). Foreign aid is, after narcotics, the readiest source of income in Afghanistan. But it has been widely estimated that because of stealing and mismanagement in Kabul, the capital, less than half of the money actually finds its way into projects, and only a quarter of that makes it to the countryside, where 70 percent of the people live.

To Afghans now, as to Vietnamese then, the government is more often an arbitrary force to be feared than a benevolent protector. Ordinary Vietnamese lived with the fear of crossing someone more powerful, who could always turn them over to the Americans as an enemy sympathizer; a similar fear pervades Afghanistan now. When U.S. forces quickly crushed the Taliban after 9/11, many Afghans welcomed them, thinking the all-powerful Americans would transform their streets and schools and the economy. Now bitterness has set in. "What have the people of Afghanistan received from the Coalition?" asks Zamir Kabulov, the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan. "They lived very poorly before, and they still live poorly—but sometimes they also get bombed by mistake."

Nation-building in Afghanistan may be a hopeless cause. Periods of peace under centralized rule have been few and far between. Violence has been the norm: in the 18th century a Persian king, Nadir Shah, suppressed a revolt and beheaded 6,500 tribesmen (chosen by lot). He stacked their heads in a pyramid—with one of the instigators of the revolt entombed inside. And the Saudi diplomat is right in this sense: especially across the Pashtun belt in southern Afghanistan, local leaders have traditionally held more sway than whoever's in power in Kabul. The Taliban may not be fighting in a nationalist cause per se, as the Viet Cong were. But they certainly are more local, better rooted than the U.S.-led coalition.

The basic mantra of counterinsurgency is "clear, hold and build." Clear the area of insurgents. Hold it so the insurgents cannot return. Build the civic works and government structures so that the community decides to back the government. That's a coherent approach. But while foreign troops can clear better than the Taliban, they simply can't hold as well. In fact, the Taliban are getting pretty good at counterinsurgency themselves—"clear, hold and build" is what they're doing across southern Afghanistan. Their strict brand of justice is appealing to some Afghans, who crave order and security. In some areas Taliban commanders have even relaxed some of their more unpopular dictates, allowing girls to go to school, for instance. Last month, the sober and respected International Council on Security and Development reported that the Taliban "now holds a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, up from 54 percent a year ago." They are moving in on Kabul; according to the ICOS report, "three of the four main highways in Kabul are now compromised by Taliban activity."