Lewis Sorley: The Real Afghan Lessons From Vietnam
[Mr. Sorley, a military historian and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, is the author of "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam" (Harcourt, 1999).]
More than 30 years have passed since North Vietnam, in gross violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, conquered South Vietnam. That outcome was partly the result of greatly increased logistical support to the North from its communist backers. It was also the result of America's failure to keep its commitments to the South.
Those commitments included promises to maintain a robust level of financial support, to replace combat materiel, and even the use of air power to support the South in case of aggression by the North. That failure was the doing of a U.S. Congress that had tired of the country's long involvement in a war in Southeast Asia and cared nothing for the sacrifices of its own armed forces or those of the South Vietnamese people.
Since then, whenever America has entered into other military actions abroad or contemplated such commitments, the specter of Vietnam has been raised. It is entirely appropriate that earlier military experiences be examined for such "lessons learned" as they may yield. But it is equally essential that those prior campaigns be accurately understood before any valid comparisons are made. When it comes to the Vietnam War, much skewed or inaccurate commentary has impeded our understanding of that conflict and its outcome.
All the better-known early works on the Vietnam War—by Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, George Herring—concentrated disproportionately on the early period of American involvement when Gen. William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces. As a consequence, many came to view the entirety of the war as more or less a homogeneous whole, and to apply to the whole endeavor valid criticisms of the early years, ignoring what happened after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive.
William Colby, who headed American support for the South Vietnamese pacification program (and was later director of the CIA), once remarked that the prevalence of such truncated treatments of the Vietnam War was like what Americans would know about World War II if the histories of that conflict had stopped before Stalingrad, the invasion of North Africa and Guadalcanal.
We now know, or should, that virtually everything changed when Abrams took command. The changes grew out of his understanding of the nature of the war, and of his conviction that upgrading South Vietnam's armed forces and rooting out the enemy's covert infrastructure in rural hamlets and villages must be accorded equal priority with combat operations. Even combat operations were radically reconfigured...
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More than 30 years have passed since North Vietnam, in gross violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, conquered South Vietnam. That outcome was partly the result of greatly increased logistical support to the North from its communist backers. It was also the result of America's failure to keep its commitments to the South.
Those commitments included promises to maintain a robust level of financial support, to replace combat materiel, and even the use of air power to support the South in case of aggression by the North. That failure was the doing of a U.S. Congress that had tired of the country's long involvement in a war in Southeast Asia and cared nothing for the sacrifices of its own armed forces or those of the South Vietnamese people.
Since then, whenever America has entered into other military actions abroad or contemplated such commitments, the specter of Vietnam has been raised. It is entirely appropriate that earlier military experiences be examined for such "lessons learned" as they may yield. But it is equally essential that those prior campaigns be accurately understood before any valid comparisons are made. When it comes to the Vietnam War, much skewed or inaccurate commentary has impeded our understanding of that conflict and its outcome.
All the better-known early works on the Vietnam War—by Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, George Herring—concentrated disproportionately on the early period of American involvement when Gen. William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. forces. As a consequence, many came to view the entirety of the war as more or less a homogeneous whole, and to apply to the whole endeavor valid criticisms of the early years, ignoring what happened after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command soon after the 1968 Tet Offensive.
William Colby, who headed American support for the South Vietnamese pacification program (and was later director of the CIA), once remarked that the prevalence of such truncated treatments of the Vietnam War was like what Americans would know about World War II if the histories of that conflict had stopped before Stalingrad, the invasion of North Africa and Guadalcanal.
We now know, or should, that virtually everything changed when Abrams took command. The changes grew out of his understanding of the nature of the war, and of his conviction that upgrading South Vietnam's armed forces and rooting out the enemy's covert infrastructure in rural hamlets and villages must be accorded equal priority with combat operations. Even combat operations were radically reconfigured...