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Will There Be an Afghanistan Syndrome?
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16434 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1989 |
3,013 Words |
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Stephen A. Garrett
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The American philosopher George Santayana, in an endlessly repeated comment concerning the lessons of history, argued that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it." Following the final withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the question arises as to whether the Soviets could have avoided their disastrous encounter with that country had they remembered the American experience in Vietnam.
Comparing the Afghanistan and Vietnam episodes has actually been something of a cottage industry among political commentators ever since the initial Soviet intervention in December 1979. Inevitably, these analyses have been of varying usefulness and cogency; but there are certain rather striking parallels between the two events that continue to deserve attention, perhaps especially so now that Soviet forces have completed their exit under the terms of the Geneva agreement.
It must be said at the outset that there is one fundamental difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam that must be recognized: whatever one feels about the wisdom of the American role in Vietnam, and the suffering that this policy occasioned for both Americans and Vietnamese alike, there is no question but that the United States was attempting to sustain an indigenous regime in Saigon against external aggression. To be sure, the Vietnam conflict had elements of a civil war. There was ample reason for many Vietnamese in the south to be unhappy with the character of the government in Saigon, and a number of these joined in the military effort to overthrow that government. Particularly as the war progressed, however, the bulk of the military pressure against the Saigon government was a result of a fairly traditional invasion by North Vietnamese troops across the 17th parallel. Given the course of events since the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975, it seems idle to deny that, at least for a majority of South Vietnamese, a continuation of the ancient regime would have been far preferable to the government that took its place. The hundreds of thousands of boat people, as well as land refugees, seems ample testament to this fact: The South Vietnamese have been voting with their feet (and their cars) on this matter ever since 1975.
In direct contrast, the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan in 1979 not in support of a government with at least some measurable support but in order to install a rump regime that would do its bidding. It is interesting to recall that through political bumbling the new government of Babrak Karmal actually did not issue its "invitation" to Moscow to render "fraternal assistance" until several days after Soviet forces had arrived in Kabul. Moreover, Karmal had to be flown in from the Soviet Union, where he had been resident for a considerable period of time, in order to form a government representing the "popular will."
Consider also the matter of refugees. One of the great tragedies of the Afghanistan conflict has been the millions of Afghans who have fled their country into neighboring Pakistan or Iran. Assuming that the Najibullah government now has only a relatively brief life span, what we will be witnessing is a massive flow of people back into Afghanistan rather than the other way around. The point seems obvious enough: Even given the troubling moral questions that impacted and continue to impact on the American experience in Vietnam, there is simply no moral comparison to be made between the character of the American role in Vietnam and that of the Soviets in
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