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Afghanistan is the new Vietnam (Part 1 of 2)
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President Obama gave a speech to schoolchildren over a week ago which came under a lot of criticism. He preached how they need to work hard in school, do problems multiple times until they learn to solve it and to always look for ways to improve themselves.
The part of the speech that was most interesting was when President Obama mentions that learning about history, serves the purpose of learning the mistakes of the past.
That quote seems to ring a little hallow with the current situation of the war in Afghanistan appearing more and more to the Vietnam War. It does appear that Obama and Secretary Gates are repeating many of the same mistakes that were by President Johnson and McNamara.
During the Vietnam War, the United States made the mistake of alienating many of the people with the tactics against the NVA and the Vietcong. One of the more famous quotes to come out of the war is “it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it”.
This is the perfect explanation of how the enemy would ambush soldiers on patrol. American soldiers then would go to the nearest village, suspecting Vietcong sympathy, and burn the village to the ground. A Vietnamese village that was probably around for a hundred or a thousand years would be gone. Every destroyed Vietnamese village created more and more support for the Vietcong.
The same mistake is being repeated in Afghanistan, with some different minor details. First, we do have the American military killing innocent civilians with indiscriminate bombing tactic that is the same as in Vietnam. The difference is that the United States has chosen to spray poppy fields and adopt a policy of interdiction with the opium trade in Afghanistan.
While this may be positive in the war against drugs, it is seriously hurting the war on terror. Afghanistan is a nation whose economy is almost entirely based on the production of Opium and the heroin trade. Only twelve percent of the terrain of the country is arable for farming. Seventy percent of that small percentage of land is used to grow opium. Afghanistan grows more than twice the world demand for heroin.
After September 11th, the United States comes and kicks the Taliban out of power, which were barely hanging on to it in the first place. Instead of being smart and doing the exact opposite of what the Taliban did, which made the very unpopular decision to ban the production of opium, they continue the same thing.
Afghanistan is a country that has been based on the growing of Opium for hundreds of years. Much of the opium that was produced during the 18th and early 20th century made it way to the Opium dens of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities across the United States and Europe. Spraying the fields has resulted in same results as the burning of villages in Vietnam forty years ago.
Instead of just the people of turning to the other side, the individuals who really control the country have as well. Much of the money of now made in the Opium trade is used to finance the Taliban, which has learned its lesson faster than the United States.
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