Now we have a review of the book by someone with no business offering his opinion on the Afghanistan War, let alone comparing it to the Vietnam War which he blew when he had the job of covering it.
Basically, the reviewer endorses the idea that our brilliant diplomat on the scene could have given us a negotiated victory with the Taliban if we'd let him. The reviewer, Sheehan, gives this notion credibility based on his triumph of the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnia War in the former Yugoslavia:
Holbrooke was the most talented and effective diplomat of his generation. His greatest accomplishment came in 1995, when he ended the bloodshed in Bosnia (where inter-communal strife had killed about 100,000 people) by browbeating Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic and his Croatian and Muslim rivals into accepting the Dayton Peace Agreement.
What a load of hooey. You know what ended that war rather than a glorious diplo-speak browbeating of Milosevic? A Croatian and Bosnian Moslem offensive that broke the backs of the ethnic Serbs and made continued fighting at the risk of further actual beatings on the ground seem rather pointless. Bonus points if you remember that the offensive was designed by an American military contractor company.
Getting the sides to stop further fighting after some minor land swaps with the Dayton Accords was nice, but hardly the diplomatic coup that Sheehan tries to claim. Our limited air attacks, while not decisive in creating new facts on the ground, at least was a threat of more to come if the Serbs didn't agree to ending the war. But claiming that this experience shows that Holbrooke could have gotten a diplomatic victory a few years ago in entirely different circumstances (aside from the questions of whether it would be strategically or morally right to agree to specific terms with those thugs) is simply fantasy thinking.
But wait, there's more.
The real offense is Sheehan's attempt to compare current problems with the Vietnam War, which he "covered." This is pure comedy gold:
Americans are a historyless people. We are constantly being told by wishfully thinking leaders that history does not apply to us, that we are its “exception.” Unfortunately, we are not, which is why it bears repeating that what the Obama administration is attempting to do in Afghanistan bears a striking resemblance to what the United States attempted in Vietnam. Nguyen Van Thieu, our man in Saigon, headed a coterie of fellow generals, politicians and their greedy wives who excelled at thievery and bequeathed us one of the fundamental lessons of the Vietnam War, that one cannot build upon the quicksand of corruption a sound government and army that will stand up to its opponent. When the moment of truth came in 1975, after the United States had pulled out its combat forces and the North Vietnamese army launched another offensive, the Saigon regime simply collapsed, its well-equipped troops abandoning their weapons and fleeing so fast that the opposition had difficulty catching up to them.
One, what leaders tell us history doesn't apply to us? But this is merely an annoying aside.
Two, Sheehan accusing Americans of being historyless is rich.
In fact, when we left South Vietnam, we left a government in control of its land--excepting the North Vietnamese troops holding border terrain, which we decided to ignore--with a military capable of holding off the North Vietnamese army in a conventional fight. Unfortunately for the South Vietnamese, the assumption was that after winning at such a high cost, we'd continue to provide logistics support to the South Vietnamese armed forces and we'd even commit air and naval forces in emergency to help them. In 1972, with our logistics support and air power, South Vietnamese forces withstood a North Vietnamese offensive. Clearly, our plan could work.
But after we left completely, Congress denied South Vietnam both the resources to support the conventional armed forces we'd designed and forbade our direct support from the air and sea. So when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam, South Vietnamese forces lacked the support to make their military capable of resisting the North Vietnamese who violated the peace treaty to invade and win the war.
The idea that it was the corruption of South Vietnam that led to their defeat is nonsense. Corrupt governments and armies are the norm around the world. They can survive depending on the state of their armed enemies.
The fact is, South Vietnam's government was good enough to defeat the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese reinforcements before we left; and would have withstood North Vietnam's conventional forces in 1975 if Saigon had received the support they absolutely had to have to operate.
But other than screwing up South Vietnam reporting, misunderstanding the fall of South Vietnam, and failing to recognize cause and effect in Bosnia, Sheehan is the perfect man to review a book that gets Afghanistan wrong, too.
We are not immune to history. But history is made by people making decisions. If we decide not to win in Afghanistan, it will be history all right.
