The recent American airstrikes around Kandahar against Taliban positions raise the prospect that the United States will provide sustained and co-ordinated airstrikes after its final withdrawal date on August 31st 2021 so as to help prevent a bloodbath in Afghanistan.
The following article was written before these US airstrikes on Kandahar in the hope that the United States would not abandon Afghanistan.
The impending Taliban takeover of Afghanistan resulting from the precipitous American withdrawal from that nation should be causing angst around the world. During their previous time in power (1996 to 2001) the Taliban gained a reputation as the cruellest regime in the second half of the twentieth century since the infamous Khmer Rouge (KR) in Cambodia between April 1975 and January 1979.
What is frustrating about the KR’s ascent to power in Cambodia in 1975 and the Taliban’s impending return to power in Afghanistan in 2021 is that this was (and will be) primarily due to an American abdication in leadership in world affairs because of the Vietnam Syndrome. This way of thinking maintains that the United States cannot successfully sustain prolonged military action abroad when it is not in America’s direct interest to do so. The public policy failures of the United States’ twenty-year commitment in Afghanistan have led to a resurgence of the Vietnam Syndrome with tragic consequences for the Afghani people who are about to be re-subjected to a Khmer Rouge style regime.
It is therefore helpful that a retrospective over-view and comparison between Cambodia and Afghanistan (with reference also to Vietnamese history) be undertaken to put the US policy into perspective and to hope that by so doing it will become apparent that American air power can still be applied to save Afghanis from the ghastly horrors of the re-imposition of Taliban rule.
Afghanistan: The Monarchists’ Republic
The first major mistake with regard to the American led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was the installation of the so-called Rome Group to power that year. The Rome group was formed from the exiled families who were loyal to Afghanistan’s deposed king, Zahir Shah, who had reigned between 1933 and 1973 and who was then resident in Rome.
It was not a mistake for the Rome Group to have initially led Afghanistan’s provisional government because the exiled Zahir Shah was then by far that nation’s most popular figure as most Afghanis were at that time desirous of a reinstated constitutional monarchy. This was because the turmoil which had followed the king’s 1973 deposition had led most Afghanis to look back upon the monarchy with nostalgia, if not rose-coloured glasses. However, on a practical note, the era of monarchy had been one during which Afghanistan was administered along decentralized tribal lines with the monarchy being the metaphorical glue which held the nation together.
Had a Loya Jirga (or tribal assembly) been called to vote in favour of a monarchical reinstatement (which could have been followed by a popular referendum to validate this decision) then the American led occupation of Afghanistan could have been considerably shorter and might have been successfully concluded. Unfortunately, and ironically, the Americans took the advice of the Rome Group – the core of which was Afghanistan’s deposed royal family- against reinstating the monarchy!
The Rome Group advised that its preferred option was to rule over a centralized republic with an executive presidency. This republican model was preferred by the Rome Group because it wanted to exercise power in order to enrich its supporters. Furthermore, the Americans blundered because the Afghan republic was (and still is) centralized in its structure so that there would be greater scope for corruption.
The establishment of a centralized republic also served to alienate Afghanistan’s multi-ethic tribal based society so that the Taliban rebounded in the countryside. Consequently, the United States led occupation found itself fighting a never-ending insurgency as Washington poured billions of dollars in aid money into Afghanistan, much of which went to a corrupt regime, whose other main skill (beside that of corruption) was to maintain the trappings of democracy as witnessed by the numerous competitive electoral processes in place in the country.
The Vietnam Parallel
The situation in Afghanistan (2001 to 2021) has been eerily similar to French ruled Vietnam between 1949 and 1954. Because of the communist victory in China in 1949, the French re-called Bao Dai the former Vietnamese emperor to power in late 1949. This was done because the Chinese communists were now in a position to supply the communist Viet Minh with arms. Consequently, the French needed to rally non-communist Vietnamese support if they were going to hold-off against Ho Chi Minh’s communist Viet Minh forces.
There was initially substantial support for Bao Dai, particularly in the north of Vietnam due to memories of the terror campaign which the Viet Minh had undertaken against nationalist Vietnamese in that part of the country between 1945 and 1946.
Although initially possessing a degree of popular support, the Bao Dai government’s constitutional/legal status was ambiguous, because the former monarch ruled over Vietnam as a ‘free state’ in ‘association’ with France. The reality of this ambiguity was continued French domination. Nevertheless, as the Viet Minh made military gains against the French, Bao Dai was able to obtain concessions from the French government including, the establishment of a Vietnamese National Army.
Bao Dai’s constitutional relationship with his citizens/subjects was also ambiguous. Technically he did not rule as an emperor but rather as chief of state and was to do so until elections to a constituent assembly were held which would resolve whether Vietnam was to be a constitutional monarchy or a republic. In the interim, Bao Dai possessed the prerogative of appointing cabinets so that he ruled more akin to an absolute monarch than to a constitutional one. The benefit of this arrangement, from Bao Dai’s perspective, was the scope (similar to contemporary Afghanistan) for the former imperial family to corruptly enrich themselves. Had Bao Dai instead called elections (which the communists would have been excluded from) to a constituent assembly they probably would have been won by the northern based Dai Viet Party. Because this party had borne the brunt of Ho Chi Minh’s brutal 1945-1946 purge its anti-communism was unabashed.
A Dai Viet majority constituent assembly probably would have voted for a constitutional monarchy therefore depriving the imperial Nguyen clan of its capacity for self-enrichment. Bao Dai stubbornly held off against such elections to a constituent assembly to avoid such an outcome.
Despite Bao Dai’s personal flaws there was still potential for him, as chief of state to continue to exploit Viet Minh military successes to gain concessions for his government and to thereby gradually advance Vietnam toward full independence. Unfortunately, the abrupt and stunning Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 terminated this Bao Dai strategy for eventually gaining full Vietnamese independence.
The consequent collapse in French will-power to hold onto Vietnam (and Indochina) which came with their defeat at Dien Bien Phu caused the division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel into a communist North and a non-communist South in June 1954. Perhaps, realizing that he would not survive without the French to prop him up, Bao Dai decided against returning to Vietnam in 1954. This decision doomed the by now discredited Nguyen clan, and just over a year later in October 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, whom Bao Dai had appointed as prime minister in 1954, established a South Vietnamese republic.
The historic Vietnamese and contemporary Afghan parallels are uncanny in that there is a tale of two respective royal families which forewent the opportunity of constitutional monarchical reinstatement so as to corruptly enrich themselves together with their cronies.
South Vietnam: The United States Applies the Wrong Military Strategy
South Vietnam’s presidential republic (The First Republic, 1955 to 1963) was authoritarian but was nowhere near as repressive as Ho Chi Minh’s regime in North Vietnam. President Diem had his strengths and his weaknesses as a ruler. Unfortunately, he over-centralized power in his Ngo clan which caused considerable unrest, so the United States backed military coup in November 1963 in which President Diem and his brother Nhu sadly lost their lives.
Whether the Kennedy administration should have backed or indeed instigated this coup against President Diem is a moot point. Nevertheless, whatever President Diem’s faults, the post-coup context led to political chaos which enveloped South Vietnam between 1964 and 1965. It was into this vacuum that Allied soldiers led by the United States, entered South Vietnam reaching over half a million troops by 1968!
Whether there would there have been such a massive deployment of troops had President Kennedy not been assassinated in November 1963 is an intriguing speculation. Being an intelligent man, President Kennedy took advice from intelligent people. He was advised by perhaps America’s most brilliant of generals, Douglas McArthur, not to fight a land war in Southeast Asia. This did not necessarily mean abandoning South Vietnam but instead looking at an alternative strategy to the one employed.
Why the Wingate Military Strategy could have been a Winner
An alternative military strategy which could have been applied by the United States in Indochina was the approach, devised by the British general, Orde Wingate. General Wingate maintained that the key to military success was not to engage on the enemy’s terms which often happens when fighting a guerrilla war.
The Wingate strategy could have been applied in the Vietnamese context in the 1960s. For example, American ships and/or aircraft carriers could have been stationed off the coast of South Vietnam. If communist forces took a centre, such as Danang, then American troops stationed on the offshore ships could have been landed in that port city to drive out the communists before then evacuating in favour of the South Vietnamese army, (the Army of the Vietnam Republic, the ARVN).
Furthermore, priority should have been given to the United States bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail because it was through this ingenious network of thousands of jungle pathways meandering through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam by which thousands of North Vietnamese regular soldiers, posing as southern Viet Cong guerrillas, inserted themselves into South Vietnam.
Media Misreporting
Instead, between 1965 and 1968 the United States (as well as South Korea, Thailand, and Australia) sent troops into South Vietnam to fight as a garrison force against communist guerrilla forces. Public support in the United States for the Vietnam commitment remained strong until the Tet offensive of February 1968. It was the accepted custom during the annual Tet Vietnamese New Year celebrations that military hostilities temporarily ceased. However, in 1968 this arrangement was violated by communist forces who had surreptitiously entered South Vietnamese cities to launch attacks at this time on key military and government installations, including the US embassy in Saigon.
Despite the South Vietnamese people declining to rally to support these attacks and the fact that the communists suffered massive casualties, media misreporting fostered the perception that the war situation was out of control and was beyond the point of redemption. This media misreporting on the Tet offensive resulted in President Lyndon Baines Johnson announcing in March 1968 that he would not seek a further presidential term.
President Nixon Seeks Peace with Honour
The political ramifications of this misreporting on the Tet offensive were such that the successful Republican presidential candidate, Richard Milhouse Nixon, was compelled to run on the campaign theme of ‘peace with honour’. This slogan meant that as president, Nixon would be required to withdraw American troops from South Vietnam by the end of his first presidential term but without sacrificing South Viet Nam to the communists. The achievement of this almost contradictory goal would take all of Nixon’s considerable political acumen to achieve. What is incredibly frustrating is that Nixon may well have achieved ‘peace with honour’ had it not been for post-1973 US congressional sabotage.
Nixon’s stated objective of ‘peace with honour’ did for a while abate the vitriol of the so-called ‘anti-war’ protest movement against his administration during its first six months of office in 1969. This abruptly changed when the administration did not take up the opportunity of the July 1969 Paris peace negotiations (not to be confused with the Paris peace negotiations in January 1973) to create a coalition government between the communists and non-communist interests in South Vietnam.
Had the Nixon administration foisted a coalition government on South Vietnam (which would have been tantamount to a communist takeover) between the Saigon regime and Hanoi’s satellite the National Liberation Front (NLF) and abruptly withdrawn Allied troops in 1969, then the US position in the Third World would most probably have collapsed. The international position of the United States would have been so undermined, and the Soviet Union would have been so strengthened that its empire’s life span could well have extended beyond 1991.
The fact that the communist triumph in Indochina in 1975 did not prolong the Soviet empire between 1989/1991 was due to the ramifications of Nixon’s opening to communist China in February 1972, which fundamentally shifted the balance of power in the world so that Moscow was unable to consequently maintain its then globally important strategic position.
Cambodia Enters the Vietnam War
Frustratingly, the United States endured agony as it attempted to disengage militarily from Indochina without creating a vacuum which Hanoi could fill. Therefore, the Nixon administration invaded North Vietnamese occupied eastern Cambodia in late April 1970 so as to interdict supplies into South Vietnam in order to bolster the Vietnamization policy of withdrawing Allied troops so that the ARVN could effectively fill the vacuum.
Anti-war critics/historians have argued that this American led ‘invasion’ of Cambodia brought the ravage of war to this country. The war actually came to this Southeast Asian nation when the Lon Nol government (which had constitutionally deposed Cambodia’s avowedly neutralist chief of state, Prince Sihanouk in March 1970) decided to occupy eastern Cambodian territory following the withdrawal of American/South Vietnamese forces in May 1970.
Notionally, it was not unreasonable for a sovereign nation to re-occupy its own territory. However, it could be argued that this action was foolhardy because it entailed the much weaker Cambodian army taking on the might of the North Vietnamese army between May 1970 and March 1972. During this time period the North Vietnamese army greatly weakened Cambodia’s armed forces thereby paving the way for the Peking backed communist KR guerrillas to be on the brink of capturing the Cambodian capital Phnom Penn in January 1973. This would have occurred had the Nixon administration not flown in emergency supplies and attacked the KR positions from the air.
Richard Nixon Almost Saves Cambodia
Utilizing its increased leverage with the Cambodian regime, the Nixon administration compelled President Lon Nol to banish his brother and Eminence Gris, General Lon Non into temporary exile and to form a new cabinet in May 1973 headed by In Tam (who had run against Lon Nol in the discredited June 1972 presidential election). Again, as a result of an American initiative, legislative and executive power was vested in a newly formed High Political Council. This executive was composed of one -time domestic opponents of President Lon Nol but who had also previously helped instigate Prince Sihanouk’s deposition in March 1970.
Between April and June 1973, the United States and Peking entered into negotiations concerning a political settlement in Cambodia under which Lon Nol would be eased out and Prince Sihanouk reinstated as chief of state with the prince sharing power with the High Political Council. Had such, an arrangement been arrived at then Peking would have cut off aid to the KR by giving its support to a restored Prince Sihanouk thereby denying those genocidal guerrillas access to power.
US Congressional Sabotage leads to The Cambodian Genocide
Alas, at the time American-Sino negotiations were taking place in May and June of 1973, ‘anti-war’ US legislators led by Senate Majority Leader, Senator Mike Mansfield, were moving to cut off funding for the bombing of KR military positions. In June 1973 Senator Mansfield went so far as to threaten to defund the American government unless the bombing was stopped in Cambodia. Consequently, President Nixon was compelled in June 1973 to sign a bill which terminated the bombing of KR positions after August 15th 1973.
This termination of the bombing not only thwarted the reaching of an American-Sino political settlement for Cambodia but doomed that nation to nearly four years (1975 to 1979) of genocidal hell under the KR. If any non-Cambodian deserves the opprobrium for the Cambodian Holocaust in which nearly half the population of this tragic nation perished due to killing and mass starvation it is Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana[1]!
The situation in contemporary Afghanistan is now distressingly similar to Cambodia because American air power is not being applied to save this nation from an impending holocaust. It should also be pointed out at this juncture, for those who argue that foreign intervention in Afghanistan is foredoomed to failure, that the Soviets were not defeated militarily in their earlier foray into that nation.
Although the Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in early 1989, they enabled the communist regime of Mohammad Najibullah to hold onto that nation’s cities by continued air support in which supplies were transported to government held urban areas. It was only with the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 that external aid to the Najibullah government came to an end which resulted in the subsequent fall of that regime in February 1992. Ironically, the communist Kabul regime, which owed its existence to Moscow, had briefly outlived its patron.
How Afghanistan can still be Saved
The current situation in Afghanistan is similar to when the Soviet troops were withdrawn in early 1989. Continued air support enabled the incumbent government to hold on. Similarly, if the United States provides air support to protect the regime of President Ashraf Ghani, then his government will also stand a strong chance of survival.
The Biden administration can continue to maintain air bases in Afghanistan so that Taliban positions can be bombed so as to keep those murderous guerrillas at bay. Instead of scaling back its embassy in Kabul the United States should have an activist mission in Afghanistan (similar to the embassy in Phnom Penn between March 1974 and April 1975 under Ambassador John Gunther Dean) in order to engineer needed internal reform so that the Afghan government can initiate a strategy to retake the countryside.
Because the golden opportunity for a reinstated Afghan constitutional monarchy is unfortunately gone, Afghanistan is an executive presidential republic. A benefit of such a system of governance is that talented political outsiders can be brought into government. There is a critical mass of understandably frightened but brilliant Afghans who could be brought into government service at the behest of the Biden administration.
The United States by providing air cover to Afghanistan’s cities would not only have the leverage (as the Nixon administration did in Cambodia in 1973 with the Lon Nol regime) to inject Afghanistan’s government with needed talent but also, more importantly, to prevent a Taliban takeover.
A United States State Department official, Kenneth Quinn, attempted to warn the world in 1974 of how disastrous a KR victory would be in Cambodia. The world does not need another Kenneth Quinn to warn of the evil consequences for Afghanistan should the Taliban return to power now. Furthermore, the Taliban will not be content just with ruling Afghanistan. They will also provide Jihadists with a base to try and bring down pro-American regimes such as Saudi Arabia. The United States should appreciate that its position in the Third World will also be fatally undercut vis a vis Beijing if America cuts and runs from Afghanistan. Already the People’s Republic of China is sounding out the Afghanistan government with offers of military assistance in its battle with the Taliban.
President Biden may think that he will become a folk hero by abandoning the Afghan people to the Taliban and therefore ‘ending the war in Afghanistan’ but America’s problems around the world will just get worse as a result of the reasons which have been cited in this article.
The United States does not have to perpetually station troops in Afghanistan. Rather, America can utilise air support (as the Soviets did between 1989 and 1991). This would not only render an invaluable service to the people of Afghanistan but would also prevent President Biden from becoming to that nation what Senator Mike Mansfield became to Cambodia!
[1] American Professor Noam Chomsky in a disturbing monologue in the documentary Manufacturing Consent ludicrously revised down the number of Cambodians who were killed by the KR regime and erroneously claimed that more Cambodians were killed by the American bombing of Cambodia.