It seems so simple, superior military might should crush ideology. If you look at the real world results of this line of thinking, you can see it’s absolutely not true, and is a mistake the United States keeps repeating. I do not mean this article to disparage U.S. military people past and current, but to examine the political decision making that puts them in no-win situations.
Vietnam War:
Though the Vietnam war had many atrocities, were going to examine the decision making made throughout the war period.
After World War II, the United States started a foreign policy known as Containment. This was a smaller part of a foreign policy known as the Cold War. The U.S. viewed Communism and its major proponent for it, the U.S.S.R. as an evil that would corrupt democracy and the rest of the world. To stop the spread of communism, the U.S. would use military force to stop the ideology from spreading to neutral or democracy friendly countries. One of the first tests of this strategy would be the Vietnam war.
In 1946, The People’s Army of Vietnam (aka the communist party) started a war in French Indochina (modern day Vietnam) against its colonizers, France. The result was that it gave the Peoples Army of Vietnam control of North Vietnam. South Vietnam would continue to be governed by a democratic, friendly government. Essentially, Vietnam was split to resemble Korea, with a communist northern separate country and a “free” democratic southern country.
France quit trying to recolonize Vietnam and the U.S. assumed financial and military support for South Vietnam in 1954. The Viet Cong were sympathizers of Communism and the Northern Vietnam government. They wanted to institute communism in South Vietnam, so they started a guerilla war against the government.
Given the U.S. support of the containment strategy, they sent military forces to South Vietnam to stop the insurgency. President John F. Kennedy escalated the military presence in South Vietnam. Before he took office, there were under 1,000 military advisors, that number grew to 23,000 in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson increased the troop levels to 184,000. The Soviet Union and China backed North Vietnam. Though the South Vietnamese and U.S. forces had air superiority and overwhelming firepower, and large-scale bombing campaigns, the war dragged on as the Viet Cong would not quit because they fully believed in the communist ideology.
As the war dragged on, the U.S. public grew weary of the effort. The cost of the war (in lives and money) and the benefit was just not worth it to most citizens. Under now President Richard Nixon, the U.S. started a strategy of troop withdrawal to appease the U.S. public. Under this strategy, the Vietcong started winning more battles and more territory. As the Vietcong approached Saigon, chaos, unrest and panic broke out. U.S. forces started evacuating South Vietnam and the U.S. embassy. On April 30,1975, the last U.S. Marines evacuated the embassy by helicopter right before the embassy was swarmed and breached. That same day, Vietcong troops entered Saigon and quickly took over the city.
After 20 years of fighting, the war ended up costing up to 3 million in Vietnamese lives and 58,200 U.S. military lives. Vietnam became and still is a unified communist country. The many lessons of Vietnam were learned but soon forgotten.
Afghanistan/Soviet war :
Many military powers have ruled the area of the world known as Afghanistan. For the sake of brevity, we will examine Afhanistan from the late 1970s onwards. In 1978, the communist party seized control of Afganistan in a bloody coup. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were still following the Containment policy and neither could allow the other to gain or give up ideology turf. Soviets were unsatisfied with the local Afhanistan government, so they invaded Afghanistan, killed the government leader and set up a puppet government to reign over the country. The United States and Pakistan fighting on the side of “freedom”, supported the Afghan rebels against the Soviet backed new government regime. We know this war as the Soviet-Afghan war. The U.S. gave billions of dollars and weapons to the rebels. In a sense of irony, part of the rebels would become what we know as al-Qaeda today.
After nine years of fighting, between 562,000 – 2 million Afghans were killed. The Soviet Union, facing economic troubles at home and an uncertainty of the war outcome, withdrew from Afghanistan from 1988 to 1989. Civil war soon ensued in the country until the communist regime collapsed in 1992. Civil war broke out again. The Taliban, with support from Pakistan, emerged as the victors of this latest civil war in 1996. Under the Taliban regime, they brutalized many women, Afghan civilians were massacred, they denied UN food supplies to starving citizens and vast acres of fertile land were burnt.
9/11 Attack / Afghanistan war:
On September 11, 2001, Islamist extremist executed terrorist attacks on the U.S. The terrorists hijacked airplanes and crashed them into buildings such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The U.S. believed al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, though there is evidence contradicting that. U.S. President George W. Bush demanded the Afghan Taliban government hand over Osama bin Laden and expel al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. The Taliban declined to extradite Bin Laden, unless more evidence was given that he was behind the attacks.
The U.S. launched military operations in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It quickly drove the Taliban from power. Most of the al-Qaeda and Taliban members were not captured, they just escaped to Pakistan.
In 2004, Afghanistan held a popular election, where they elected their first President. Taliban leader Mullah Omar reorganized the movement and started an insurgency against the government. NATO and the U.S. trained the Afghan National Security forces to patrol their own country.
On February 29, 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a peace agreement, which called for the withdrawal of all American and Nato troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban agreed to prevent al-Qaeda from operating in areas the Taliban controlled. Once current President Biden came into office, he specified U.S. military withdrawal would begin on May, 1 2021 and be completed by August 31, 2021. President Biden also specified that the U.S. would withdraw unconditionally, regardless if al-Qaeda operated in Afghanistan.
On August 15, 2021, the Afghan capitol of Kabul fell to the Taliban, as the U.S. continued to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The conquering of Kabal essentially gave control of Afghanistan back to the Taliban.
The Afghanistan war lasted 20 years, the longest lasting war in U.S. history. The war has killed between 171,000 and 174,000 Afghani citizens. As of 2021, Brown University estimates that the war in Afghanistan has already cost $2.261 trillion. 2,443 American Soldiers died in Afghanistan.
Mistakes were Made:
The two longest wars in U.S. history both ended in results the U.S. policymakers did not envision when they went to war. What were the four recurring themes in the three wars?
1. Ideology
All three wars were started over a disagreement in the growth or advancement of an ideology. Vietnam and the Soviet/Afghan war were over the advancement of Communism. while the U.S./ Afghan war was over the mistaken belief you can eliminate, fundamental Islamic terrorism by force.
2. Sunk Cost Fallacy
After all three wars did not end as quickly as they intended, sunk cost fallacy set in. Sunk cost fallacy is the thinking that pouring more money, time, and resources into something will make it turn around or get the intended results you want. The smart move is to walk away, and go on to something else, but pride and ego kicks in and the sunk cost fallacy of thinking continues. All government parties involved were too arrogant to admit defeat or that a change in course was needed. Soldiers and regular citizens suffered most from these miscalculations, they were unable to receive resources or lost their lives. All because the decision makers wouldn’t put their egos in check.
3. Immediate withdrawal
After all three wars dragged on for a decade or more, citizen morale for the wars sank. Citizens started wondered why are we even over there? The emotional reasoning for beginning the war has waned, and the citizens started putting political pressure to withdraw from the wars. The Countries finally realizing they’ve spent tons of money, time and resources on the wars with very little to show, finally give up and immediately started withdrawing their forces.
4. The ideology the people living in the country want prevails in the long run
Vietnam became communist and remains communist. Afghanistan broke out into civil war and the Taliban prevailed after the Soviet Union withdrew. The U.S. disposed of the Taliban only for them to retake the country 20 years after being deposed. Two countries, two different governments, three wars and the result is that the ideology that the citizens wanted ends up winning in the long term.
Military might can not defeat an ideology. The ideology doesn’t go away, all it does is wait out the big military power to either get bored or tired of wasting resources, and then the ideology prevails in the long run. We have three major wars involving two global superpowers that show ideology trumps military might every time.
Afghanistan is the worst blunder of all the three to me. The U.S. had two previous examples, including one fought in the same country, to show these wars don’t work. What did the U.S. do? Repeat all the same mistakes of Vietnam and the Soviet/ Afghan wars at triple the price. And we wonder why U.S. citizens have very little to no faith in their elected government officials.
For $2 trillion the U.S. could have either provided free healthcare, paid off student loan debts, provided free college education, paid reparations, fixed our decaying infrastructure system, installed high-speed train rails all over the country, paid off our national debt or just gave out stimulus checks to every citizen. Instead, we wasted it on a geo political mistake, that we’ve made before and that the Soviets just made in the 80s.
I only hope that this line of reasoning and thinking ends after this war. History says that some other superpower will come along and think it can do things better than the U.S. and Soviets did in the past and thus prevail where they failed. Sadly they will learn the lesson, that I’ve pointed out in this piece that ideology defeats military might every time.
