Charlie Pierce is right, There Is No Mission in Afghanistan Anymore. There Isn’t Anything. There Is Only Abject Failure. And That Alone:
The attacks, they said, were “orchestrated.” Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were “carefully orchestrated.” The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government’s statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what “winning” in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.
But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. — they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.
That being said, Charlie explains that this is in some ways worse than Tet, because we’ve already lived through Tet, and apparrently have learned nothing:
And that is the biggest reason why what happened in Kabul this weekend is not Tet: because, when Tet happened, we didn’t have Tet to remember and to learn from. Afghanistan was supposed to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, and it did rather work out that way. But it turned out that Afghanistan was a worse Vietnam than Vietnam ever was, and we wandered over there just in time to make Russia’s Vietnam our own. We have done what we came for. Osama bin Laden is as dead as Lord Kitchener; the al Qaeda network, at least in Afghanistan, is in a shambles. We do not have the power to enforce a stable government on a country that so manifestly resists the notion, especially when it comes from foreigners. What in hell are we doing over there anymore.
I think that Pierce is a bit optimistic: I think that the American establishment and the Pentagon learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.
You see, they asked the question, “Why did we lose the war,” and in their infinite wisdom, they concluded that it was because the “lost” the American public, so the answer to the Vietnam debacle was to create an all volunteer force, so middle America’s sons would not be subject to conscription, and to ramp up restrictions and manipulate the media, embedded reporters and the like.
But we didn’t lose the war. We were beaten.
That question, “How were we beaten,” places the onus on that same American establishment and Pentagon, as opposed to scapegoating the public and the media, which is why they don’t ask that question.
