Obama’s Vietnam

The Taliban also has one resource that the Viet Cong never enjoyed: a steady stream of income from Afghanistan's massive heroin trade. Afghan poppies produce roughly 93 percent of the world's opium. Although, nominally, eradication has been a high priority since 2004, poppy cultivation has more than doubled. Farmers can't be persuaded to switch to other crops unless they feel confident that the Taliban won't return to kill them as punishment. And besides, they'd need passable roads to move more legitimate crops to functioning markets. The Americans don't have anywhere near enough troops—their own or those of increasingly disillusioned NATO allies—to secure the roads and the farm areas. That's not only because of Afghanistan's size (similar to Texas), but also because of a failure of strategy reminiscent of Vietnam.

America has been trying to pacify Afghanistan essentially through a counterterrorist campaign. The consequence has been that some of the military's most valuable warriors—its Special Forces—have been largely misused. Most people think of Special Forces as jumping out of helicopters on secret and dangerous missions. Actually, until George W. Bush launched his Global War on Terror—and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave the Special Operations Command the lead role—their normal (and arguably more useful) mission was to train up the armies of developing countries. In Vietnam, the Green Berets were initially (and successfully) sent into the highlands to train indigenous tribesmen as guerrilla fighters.

After 1962, however, they were diverted to fruitless efforts to seal Vietnam's frontiers. Similarly, the Special Forces in Afghanistan have been used mostly as strike teams to go after Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—or deployed along the 1,400-mile border in an effort to stop insurgents from Pakistan—rather than to train Afghanistan's own forces. "The development of Afghan security forces has been a badly managed, grossly understaffed and poorly funded mess," concluded Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Anthony Cordesman in a briefing to Democratic congressional leaders in January. The United States didn't even seriously fund the development of Afghanistan's own forces until 2007.

Even now, America and its NATO allies have provided fewer than half the trainers the Afghans need; and many of those are unskilled. As a result, the Afghan Army is too small and too poorly trained to take over the counterinsurgency missions that constitute the real battle in Afghanistan. The Afghan Army is getting better, but slowly. U.S. commanders privately think it may be five years before most units are able to operate on their own. The Afghan police remain a disaster—leaving U.S. forces to fill the vacuum.

As in Vietnam, efforts to seal the frontier have failed. The Taliban, like the North Vietnamese, has depended crucially on supply routes and sanctuaries just over the border. Just as NVA units were able to slip up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail running through Laos, the Taliban can fade away into the mountains and over the border into the lawless regions of Pakistan. These safe havens give them an invaluable space in which to train and resupply. Taliban fighters are much more willing to return to the fight knowing that their families are parked safely in Pakistan, and that they themselves can retreat there if wounded. One Taliban commander based in Pakistan even gave his men five cell-phone numbers to call for help if they got shot fighting U.S. troops across the border, promising they'd be evacuated and treated quickly.

The Americans have to be careful about chasing after the Taliban into their sanctuaries. In Vietnam, American strategists worried about bringing Russia or China into the war if they bombed too freely in and around Hanoi (by, say, sinking a Russian freighter in Haiphong Harbor). In Pakistan, the Americans worry that a heavy-handed intervention could destabilize the government, a risky move in a country with nuclear weapons. The Pakistanis have shared intelligence on Qaeda targets—and have from time to time launched offensives against Pakistani Taliban fighters along the border—but meanwhile, members of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, have formed covert alliances with some Afghan Taliban factions. The Pakistanis have a strategic interest in keeping Afghanistan—which has developed close ties to archenemy India—weak. Since many Pakistani leaders are convinced that America will eventually leave, they're covering their bets for the future.