December 8, 2009
Understanding the Afghan War
Yesterday saw a grim total: the 100th British soldier killed in Afghanistan this year. This takes the total to 237 British troops killed since October 2001.
Total Coalition fatalities since the start of “Operation Enduring Freedom” stand at 1,536. Of that number 932 have been American.
The figures are saddening, of course. War is a horrible thing, and death a terrible business. And I haven’t even provided figures for Afghanis – civilian and combatant – killed in the conflict, or dying as a result of it. Partly that’s because such figures can only be rough estimates. But partly it’s because I want to focus on domestic reactions and responses to the conflict itself.
I am completely unqualified to pass judgement as to the relative efficacy of military action in Afghanistan. And what’s more, I see powerful arguments on both sides of the stay/withdraw debate. I’m too ignorant about foreign policy, Afghanistan, or South-Asian politics to pass any sort of informed judgement.
But what I can do is look at some other statistics, and raise some questions.
Britain, America and the rest of the “Coalition” have been fighting in Afghanistan since October 2001, i.e. just over 8 years. The Vietnam War, by contrast, is typically dated as running from September 26, 1959 to April 30, 1975, i.e. 16 years. Yet by the end of the Vietnam conflict the number of American troops killed in action stood at 58,209, the number wounded in action at 303,635 (roughly half of whom were hospitalised), and the number missing in action at 1,948.
The scale of difference between the conflicts is enormous. Even if the Afghan war drags on for another 8 years, it is highly unlikely it will record the levels of death and maiming witnessed in Vietnam.
This, of course, is something to be grateful for. The Vietnam conflict was a truly nasty affair, most especially for the people of that country, but also for the tens of thousands of young Americans who lost their lives, limbs or sanity in a pointless and brutal conflict.
But the difference in scale between the conflicts is worth reflecting on. The Afghan war is the subject of deep unpopularity, confusion and scepticism at present. Newspapers and blogs heap condemnation either upon the conflict itself, or upon a government perceived as failing to front the finance required to wage the war properly. Yet aside from a few anti-war stalls dotted around town centres, dissent and dissatisfaction is confined mostly to the published word.
Which is hardly surprising. The mass protests against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 1970s were the product of huge casualty figures, the psychological impact of the world’s first televised war (in all it’s bloody horror), and its being situated in an era of greater ideological, and frequently idealistic, politics. Many anti-war protesters were at least in part venting (ideological) frustration at the political establishment via the proxy of the war (hence why veterans were spat upon literally and metaphorically by anti-war activists, who saw returning troops not as victims but as stooges of Nixonian imperialism).
Of course, if one were being cynical one might also cite another aspect of the Vietnam conflict – and the reaction against it – that distinguishes it from Afghanistan: the draft. Although it’s part of the conventional wisdom that it was easy for the American middle classes to avoid conscription, I do wonder about the extent to which the existence of the draft motivated protest from sections of society that in the present conflict are simply unaffected (unless they choose to be).
But what does it all mean? Very hard to say. But the nature of modern war seems in some sense to have changed. I use Vietnam as my comparative example because, like Afghanistan, it was a war which saw several years of sustained engagement by a western power with no apparent prospect of victory. Similarly, Afghanistan at present dominates foreign policy discourse and domestic agendas, as did Vietnam. Yet the two conflicts appear radically different in their nature, development, and the domestic reactions to them. And I can’t think of an appropriate historical antecedent for Afghanistan.
(We could, of course, point to the continuing US presence in Iraq. However the pattern here is Afghan-like: in six years, total fatalities for coalition forces stand at 4,685, which is again in stark contrast to the scale of Vietnam).
The conflict in Afghanistan is brutal, but nothing like the horrors of Vietnam. Soldiers still die, but nowhere near as many. The population of Afghanistan certainly suffers, but it seems clear that it does not suffer the same levels of horror endured by the Vietnamese. The public mood and reaction in western nations is instructive in its timidity: blogging dissent and angry editorials, sure – but protests in the street and demands to bring the troops home? That’s so last century.
So what is the Afghan conflict? A war of predominantly lower-class troops sent eastward to combat the evil foe of Islamism, in a never-ending grind of (relative, in historical terms) low-level attrition, whilst the comfortable classes pontificate into their cappuccinos? Or the pre-show entertainment before Pakistan falls apart and the fun really begins?
I don’t know. But the Afghan conflict, at least at this stage, appears to be something different. Not just in the way it’s fought, but in the way it’s reacted to. Whether this sets the pattern for 21st Century conflict, or is merely a brief interlude before we resume the abject horrors of the last century (and as the planet burns and the oil runs out, pessimism seems appropriate) only time will tell.
Rob said,
December 8, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I realise this makes me sound pretty callous, but if I were generally inclined to think that war was a sensible tool of development policy, then I would be pretty worried by the unpopularity of the Afghan war – I know no-one’s really on the streets, but it is unpopular – 64% of the public think the war is unwinnable, according to a survey last month (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8348942.stm). If the British public can’t cope with 100 military deaths in a year, imagine what even Korean levels of casualty would do them.
Paul Sagar said,
December 9, 2009 at 10:42 am
Rob, I share your sentiment. It’s tricky because talking about these things non-emotively is likely to elicit a (piously) emotive reaction from some. But yes, it is very interesting to observe the lower toleration of death now than 60 years ago. Could it be because people now think the cause is less worth the cost? Islamism not the all-encompassing threat that communism was? But then, that doesn’t explain Vietnam, etc…
Top Blogging for the 9th December « Left Outside said,
December 9, 2009 at 11:03 am
[...] Paul Sagar discusses the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam. [...]
Peter said,
December 10, 2009 at 2:56 pm
“But yes, it is very interesting to observe the lower toleration of death now than 60 years ago. Could it be because people now think the cause is less worth the cost?”
- Could it not just be that deaths of soldiers are now much more publicised. Everytime a British soldier is killed, it gets a fair bit of space in the press. Was that the case in the past? I dunno.
James Arnold said,
December 10, 2009 at 9:30 pm
To be sure, there are clear disanalogies between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam, the number of casulties being an obvious one: the number of civilian casulties in Afghanistan might, according to plausible estimates, be only one hundredth of what they were by the end of Vietnam, 30,000 compared to 3,000,000. Nevertheless, the similarities are interesting and instructive. Daniel Ellsberg — a former RAND Corporation analyst who became a principle opponent of the Vietnam War after leaking what came to be known as the ‘Pentagon Papers’ — is perhaps as qualified as one can be to talk about American aggression towards Vietnam (at least from the perspective of the Western policy-makers). His view is that the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam are significant, and merit close scrutiny by those who working to end this latest military campaign. For instance, whilst the Taliban do not have the same level of support from the Afghan population as the NLF did from the Vietnamese, support for the Taliban is starting to take the same form as support for the NLF. The NLF did not have a particularly high level of support as potential political leaders of Vietnam: rather, the Vietnamese supported the NLF because they had demonstrated their prowess as combatants by beating the French, and hoped that they could expell the Americans too (as, eventually, they did). Similarly, the increasing support for the Taliban amongst the Pashtuns (who constitute 40% of the population) is related to them repackaging themselves as a force of national liberation. The more troops that Obama sends to Afghanistan, the greater this support will be, as the basis of it is opposition to occupation by a foreign military force. What we are witnessing is the merging of the Taliban’s insurgency with Pashtun nationalism, and as the knowledgable commentator Selig Harrison has put it, if that happens “we’ve had it”.
A further significant parallel, perhaps even more important from the perspective of anti-war campaigners, is the calculations that are going on in Washington right now. Obama’s decision to drastically escalate troop numbers in Afghanistan is reminiscent of Johnson’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War in 1965. We know from the internal records that Johnson’s reason for escalating the war was to avoid a “military revolt” (Ellsberg’s phrase) if he instigated a phased withdrawal. Johnson was worried that military leaders who he appointed would turn on him, characterising him as ineffacious, weak, an unmanly President who couldn’t take the necessary steps to prosecute a winnable war. This would have killed his presidency, and a similar reaction from the generals would undermine Obama. Ellsberg’s take is that Obama is pretty much facing the same situation now. He knows that it would take a combined force of maybe 600,000 troops to “pacify” Afghanistan, and that escalating the war will only lead to a bloody, drawn-out stalemate (not to victory). But he is risking his presidency if he backs offs and opposes himself to the authority of the military, especially given the attenuation of the campaign in Iraq that he has already implemented.
Awareness of these contours of internal debate and decision-making is vital. The Vietnam War only ended when the scale of opposition was such that they could not afford to send any more troops, because were serious concerns about the ability to control the domestic population. Well, that’s some goal, and if we take Ellberg’s parallels seriously it means that those who oppose the war cannot justify inaction at this crucial moment.
Paul Sagar said,
December 10, 2009 at 10:12 pm
James, cheers for a really informative comment.
I guess all I have to add is to draw on my initial post, and note that it looks unlikely that Afghanistan will turn into a Vietnam-level conflict, and in turn we’re unlikely to see protest movements of a scale required to end the war (I agree BTW with your analysis of why the Vietnam war was finished)
So that to me looks like a significant asymmetry between both conflicts; so will afghanistan go on for decade? Hyperbolic, I know, but it reminds me of the eternal far away war of Orwelll’s 1984.