Talking Vietnam, in Afghanistan
Image via Wikipedia...Actually James S. Robbins has answered these questions in his brilliant new book This Time We Win, Revisiting the Tet Offensive. One of the things he found was that the offensive did not push American voters into giving up on the war. Most favored escalation to defeat the enemy. What made the difference was when President Johnson gave up on the war and started looking for a way out more overtly. It was the failure of leadership that persuaded many Americans that our cause was hopeless. In fact it was anything but hopeless, since the enemy had been soundly defeated in his Tet offensive.
The Taliban is culturally primitive, so any sign of tactical sophistication is unsettling. Although it is unlikely that the Taliban leadership has as nuanced an understanding of the importance and dynamics of American public opinion in wartime as North Vietnam's leadership did, Taliban leaders surely know that North Vietnam won the Vietnam War not in Vietnam but in America.
And they surely know the role played by North Vietnam's February 1968 Tet Offensive. Although U.S. forces thoroughly defeated the enemy, the American public, seeing only chaos and the prospect of many more years of it, turned decisively against the war.
Might the Taliban's tactics, techniques and procedures (in military argot, TTP) make possible a spike in violence in some way comparable to Tet in its impact on American opinion? No one knows this, or how another attack on America, perhaps launched from Yemen, might affect public support for what are explained as prophylactic operations in Afghanistan.
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One of the problems with Johnson's strategy in Vietnam was that it was always focused on achieving a stalemate and not victory. When some liberals started saying we had achieved to objective, though not in a positive light, Johnson gave up.
So far, Obama has avoided at least this mistake. He still says he wants to defeat the enemy, although he is pushing his own Vietnamization plan by trying to replace our forces with Afghan forces. The problem I have with this is that he is planning on using their ineffective forces in replacing our forces. This is a mistake pushed by his political problem with his kook base. If the Afghan buildup was instead focused on adding troops to our own, it would create a surge of forces that would give us a force to space ration that would destroy the Taliban strategy. That is how to win this war.
BTW, I highly recommend Robbins' book.
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