ESSAY
Tempting as it would be to pull all Western forces out of Afghanistan soon, the United States should leave some civilian and military advisers behind. Using advisers isn't risk free, but such a strategy could help ensure Afghan stability at a relatively low cost and become a good model for use elsewhere in this age of austerity.
In their article “War Downsized” (March/April 2012), Carter Malkasian and J. Kael Weston point to the United States’ “long and successful history of deploying advisers to fight insurgencies abroad.” They mention effective operations in the Philippines, El Salvador, andColombia and suggest that such a strategy be emulated in Afghanistan.
But the authors conspicuously do not mention Vietnam. The war therestarted out as a counterinsurgency campaign fought by the government of South Vietnam in tandem with U.S. advisers. But it turned into a major war from which the United States ultimately retreated in ignominy.
Since I spent ten years with that war in one capacity or another, I can attest that it hinged on the number of casualties each side was willing to sustain. The Tonkinese in North Vietnam were willing to fight to the last man and woman to rebuild their old empire, which included central Vietnam and Cochin China in the South, whereas the United States was not willing to sustain the growing number of casualties the war was exacting.
The United States was simply lucky in the cases offered by Malkasian and Weston that the other side did not have the resources to oppose the American advisers. Their examples appear to have been chosen selectively to support an argument based on wishful thinking rather than all the available data.
S. J. DEITCHMAN
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét