Obama's Indecent Interval

By 1971, Nixon and Kissinger understood that "winning" in Vietnam was no longer in the cards — so they shifted from trying to win the war to trying to win the next election. As Nixon put it in March 1971: "We can't have [Saigon] knocked over brutally … "

Kissinger finished the thought " … before the election."

So Nixon and Kissinger pushed the South Vietnamese to "stand on their own," promising we'd support them if necessary. But at the same time, Kissinger assured the North Vietnamese — through China — that the U.S. wouldn't intervene to prevent a North Vietnamese victory — as long as that victory didn't come with embarrassing speed.

Kissinger's talking points for his 1972 meeting with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai on the topic of Vietnam included a promise that the U.S. would withdraw all troops and "leave the political evolution of Vietnam to the Vietnamese." The U.S. would "let objective realities" — North Vietnamese military superiority — "shape the political future." In the margins of his briefing book, Kissinger scrawled a handwritten elaboration for Chou: "We want a decent interval. You have our assurance."

The "decent interval" strategy worked. By declaring that "peace was at hand," Kissinger took the wind out of antiwar Democrat George McGovern's sails, and Nixon won reelection.

In other words, Nixon came to Lyndon Johnson's realization that however little Vietnam meant to American national interests, it wasn't worth the blood and treasure squandered on it. All they needed electorally was a little respect and a little time so that it didn't look like we were run out of Indo China on a rail the way the French were.

President Barack Obama is certainly smart enough to understand how little Afghanistan stacks up in the grander scheme of American core interests. So, what's going on here?

Gynne Dyer suggests that the President has simply inherited a myth too big to fail:

...assertions that al-Qaeda needs Afghanistan as a base [constitute] a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of terrorist operations, but it permeates American thinking on the subject. Even if Obama knows better himself, he cannot hope to disabuse his fellow Americans of that delusion in the time available.

Instead, he goes along with it, even saying that Afghanistan and Pakistan are “the epicentre of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda....Since 9/11, al-Qaeda's safe-havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali.” This is utter nonsense, but even if he knows it is nonsense, he cannot say so publicly.

Al-Qaeda doesn’t run training camps any more; it leaves that to the various local groups that spring up and try to follow its example both in the Muslim world and in the West. The template for Islamist terrorism is now available everywhere, so al-Qaeda no longer needs a specific territorial base. For the purpose of planning actual terrorist attacks, it never did.

Terrorist operations don’t require “bases”; they need a couple of hotel rooms or a safe house somewhere. The operational planning for the 9/11 attacks was done in Germany and the United States. The London attacks were planned in Yorkshire, the Amman attack probably in Syria, and the Bali attacks in Jakarta.

The worse case scenario?

If the Taliban conquered all of Afghanistan and then invited al-Qaeda to set up camps there–neither of which is a necessary consequence of an American withdrawal–what additional advantages would al-Qaeda enjoy?

Well, it could then fly its people in and out through Kabul in addition to using Karachi and Lahore, but they’d face even stiffer security checks at the far end of the flight. It hardly seems worth it.

The leaders of al-Qaeda would certainly like to see the Taliban regain power in Kabul, since it was al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on 9/11, specifically intended to provoke a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, that brought the Taliban regime down in the first place. But al-Qaeda takes no part in the Taliban’s war in Afghanistan: it is strictly an Afghan operation.

Even if Obama does not believe the Washington orthodoxy, which insists that who controls Afghanistan is a question of great importance to American security, his short-term strategy must respect that orthodoxy. Hence the “surge”. But the speed with which that surge is to be followed by an American withdrawal suggests that he may really know better.

July 2011 is not a long time away: all the Taliban leaders have to do is wait 18 months and then collect their winnings. If they are intelligent and pragmatic men–which they are–they may even let the foreign forces make some apparent progress in the meantime, so that the security situation looks promising when the time comes to start pulling the U.S. troops out.

In fact, the Taliban might not even try to collect their winnings right away after the foreigners leave. There’s no point in risking a backlash in the United States that might bring the American troops back.

Vietnam Redux:

This is actually how the Vietnam war ended. The United States went through a major exercise in “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s, and the last American combat troops left South Vietnam in 1973. At that point, the security situation in the south seemed fairly good–and the North Vietnamese politely waited until 1975 to collect their winnings.

In doing so, they granted Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, the “decent interval” he had requested. A decent interval, that is, between the departure of the American troops and the victory of the forces that they had been fighting, so that it did not look too much like an American defeat. In practical political terms, that is also the best outcome that Obama can now hope for in Afghanistan.

If that is Obama’s real strategy, then he can take consolation in the fact that nothing bad happened to American interests after the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. Nothing bad is likely to happen to American interests in the event of a Taliban victory, either. Nor is a Taliban victory even a foregone conclusion after an American withdrawal, since they would still have to overcome all the other ethnic forces in the country.

But, for the time being, al Qaeda has us right where it wants us:

The biggest risk Obama runs with this strategy is that it gives al-Qaeda a motive to launch new attacks against the United States. The Taliban want the U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, but al-Qaeda wants them to be stuck there indefinitely, taking casualties and killing Muslims. It’s unlikely that al-Qaeda can just order a terrorist attack in the United States, but if it looks like the U.S. troops are really going home, then it may well try.

OTOH, maybe Obama is a true believer:

...maybe all this analysis is too clever by half. Maybe Obama just thinks he can win the war in Afghanistan in the next 18 months. In that case, his presidency is doomed.

Is that it? Either Barack Obama is destined to becoming a second Lyndon Johnson sacrificing a slam-dunk second term or a second Richard Nixon with a secret plan to end the war? I can't believe this simple dichotomy really sums it up. For one thing, all American patriots that I am aware of just want Barry to become a second FDR.

Speaking of which, here's my map of Afghanistan, BTW, and don't forget to click!