Lessons from The Making of a Quagmire: Afghanistan war strategy and counterterrorism

Resolving the American War in Afghanistan

The oft repeated lament of philosophers from Tromph to Twain holds that "history repeats itself," and perhaps no human endeavor serves to exemplify this metaphysical maxim as clearly as the pursuit of war. The recurrence of regional conflicts between bitter neighbors, the overwhelming tragedy inflicted on both the victor and the vanquished, all aspects of war other than the weaponry employed are beholden to history's own vicious cycle. In his eerily prescient analysis of America's calamitous excursion into the jungles of Vietnam, entitled The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era, war correspondent and author David Halberstam demonstrates the inexorable influence of historic recurrence on modern events. Although only thirty years of age at the time of his reporting, Halberstam harnesses lessons learned through centuries of human conflict, focusing his penetrating perceptive skills on the defining event of his era: the Vietnam War. In doing so, Halberstam penned a devastating indictment of the American government's foreign policy, denouncing the military's overt displays of hubris and damning the entire endeavor with the derisive label quagmire; one which would forever after be used to describe futility in the realm of armed conflict.

While Halberstam's meticulous and objective coverage of the war's failures, at a time when major media outlets and the U.S. government were still united in their expression of jingoistic support, managed to sway public opinion by exposing the ugliest of truths, he was unable to reverse history's troubling tendency to replicate certain circumstances. Nearly four decades after The Making of a Quagmire was originally published, the United States finds itself sinking ever deeper into yet another pit of falsified justification, misappropriated funds, and militaristic failure. America's ongoing war in Afghanistan, which was launched in October of 2001 and was ostensibly designed to defeat the Al-Qaeda terrorist network seeking refuge there, has devolved into the very quagmire to which Halberstam so succinctly sounded the alarm. As was the case with the war in Vietnam, the current conflict in Afghanistan pits the overwhelming superiority of America's armed forces against an overmatched, underfunded and outgunned enemy comprised of a despotic regime and the guerilla fighters conscripted to its service. In both the Vietnam of the 1960's and Afghanistan during the early years of the war, a false sense of paternalism informed the military's overarching strategic aims and gave rise to the disastrous theory that American wars could and should be fought by proxy. Halberstam illustrates this instance of institutionalized optimism when he observes that "at every level the Americans had as a counterpart a Vietnamese officer, hopefully passing on this country's vast background of military experience, trying to make the troops more aggressive, cutting down on mistakes, fighting the war the way we believed it should be fought" (48). A review of the armed forces' current directive in Afghanistan shows that this strategy of insurrection via instruction, despite its utter and complete collapse in Vietnam, is still a fundamental tenet of American foreign policy. At this very moment, tens of thousands of American troops are charged with the unenviable, and some would say impossible, task of teaching the newly formed Afghan army how to properly function as a defensive entity. The recent rash of "friendly fire" incidents, in which Afghan soldiers under the tutelage of American officers have betrayed their instructors, injuring hundreds and killing dozens, echoes the frustration endured by American commanders in Vietnam who were never fully capable of discerning friend from foe.