Sol Sanders Archive

The downside of another Vietnam, this time
in South Asia

ShareThis

Saigon’s small U.S. style army – created through “Vietnamization” but wholly dependent on American logistics – fought valiantly but without air power fell before a hugely superior North Vietnamese conventional invasion heartily backed by Soviet and Chinese Communism. [Hanoi’s vaunted guerrillas suicided in the 1968 Tet Offensive and failed “General Uprising” – if ignored by the anti-war U.S. media.] The spectacle of helicopters frantically lifting stranded Americans from the Saigon Embassy rooftop brought a helter-skelter finis to “Vietnam”, a dismal, excruciatingly painful chapter in American foreign policy.

Historians will continue to argue endlessly about the American intervention in Southeast Asia. But because of its complexities, speculation on history's "ifs" is at best misguided, and analogies from Vietnam to Washington's current two wars are fallacious.

But there were vast repercussions from Washington’s Indochina defeat beyond the long healing process when returning heroes were treated as outcasts. As many as 160,000 died among the million imprisoned – some as long as 17 years – in Communist “reeducation” camps. Some three million fled the country – 600,000 lost at sea or in the Cambodian “killing fields” – before the U.S.-led "Orderly Departure Program [1979-1994], eventually brought 750,000 refugees. Two million Cambodians died before Hanoi intervened in 1978 halting the madness of their former allies.

Harder to prove, however, is that the drubbing American prestige took and the mystique created by a Vietnamese Communist victory inspired growing worldwide turbulence.

In 1979 Iranian revolutionaries took U.S. Embassy hostages and began building a new threat to regional and world stability. In 1983 the first large scale suicide bombing by Hizbullah cost 300 American and French lives, almost destroying Lebanon, the only island of tolerance and prosperity in the Arab world and setting the stage for a new terrorism. The prediction of dominoes falling to Communism did not take place; Mentor Minister Lee Kwan Yu of Singapore [whose trade through Cambodia facilitated Tet] has said the U.S. effort gave other Southeast Asians respite. But a totally corrupt, incompetent, repressive Communist regime still dooms the future of soon-to-be 100 million Vietnamese.

After a legislative branch changeover following the November elections, Washington will be subsumed in domestic politics, not least a still flagging economy. But a foreign policy debate is also on the docket with the continuing sacrifice – as Afghanistan casualties, and financial cost, rise – and relations with Pakistan fester. Hopefully, this time, as was not the case in 1975, it will not be decided by an out-of-sight, out-of-mind national consensus.

As President Barack Obama argued recently in a rather infelicitously recalling of 9/11, America’s ability to overcome disaster is remarkable and not to be minimized in any future catastrophe. But, again, history is as little predictable as the past can be rearranged with the adjustment of a few “Cleopatra’s noses”. [Had the Egyptian queen's aquiline Greek nose been a little less attractive, so the old chestnut goes, Caesar and Marc Antony might have resisted her charms and the fate of the Roman republic would have been very different.]

Still speculation on an American failure in Afghanistan, and its twin and perhaps even more excruciatingly difficult problem, Pakistan, is certainly legitimate before any forthcoming debate.

Quickly, here are some elements:

• As a primitive, isolated Kabul regime proved in 2001, an inability to at least neutralize Al Qaida’s former sanctuary would encourage the growing nihilistic Islamacist movement to seek such bases – not only there again but throughout the Muslim world – for attacks on the American homeland.
  
• Defeat in Afghanistan/Pakistan would encourage growing radicalization of young Muslims living in Western societies – coinciding with Europe’s increasingly bitter debate over assimilation of its critical and growing Muslims – which is now recognized as the newest most threatening terrorist development.
  
• Because of British colonial heritage and its size [170 million], Pakistan had been seen as a bet for wider modernizing of Muslim societies despite its incredibly difficult problems, so its disintegration, a possible outcome of failure in Afghanistan, would be catastrophic.
  
• Failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan could put Islamabad’s growing nuclear arsenal at risk, almost certainly producing further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. India’s 1.3 billion [with a Muslim population larger than Pakistan], despite recent rapid economic growth, remains vulnerable with unparalleled rural poverty and growing self-styled Maoist insurgencies, and would risk destabilization if the Subcontinent’s western reaches in Pakistan fell apart.
  
• Worldwide oil supplies, still the lifeblood of modern societies – the major oil trader has just announced “peak” is still far away – could become a victim of Mideast chaos [as in Nigeria where production has dwindled]. Increasing Chinese military belligerence [note the recent Chinese participation in NATO member Turkey’s air exercises] would be fed by a full-blown American retreat – not least because of the link with Pakistan in anti-India power politics.

That’s the downside of less than victory. For another time, indices of problems and “solutions”.

Comments