Losses among locals were worse: 20, Filipino insurgents and an unknown number of civilians lost their lives in the fight for independence. It was the United States testing out what role it would have on the world stage and bringing with it all the complicated racial and cultural attitudes that shaped American society at home. American troops were sent to support the South and by the time a ceasefire was proclaimed in , over five million soldiers and civilians had died.
To this day, a formal peace treaty has not been signed. However, the absence of a final conclusion to the Korean War has kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs. Bomb craters dating to the Vietnam War are seen in Xiang Khwang province of Laos, photographed in Laos is the most heavily-bombed country per capita in the world. The U. How much of this is a failure of military planning and how much of it is just the failure to understand the political reality?
The Bush-Rumsfeld team believed that the U. And then people were already thinking about a war with Iran, where we would defeat evil one at a time as the kind of righteous crusader. And of course, that was an extraordinary hubris. But even a few weeks ago, Joe Biden, who I think is much less susceptible to that kind of hubristic thinking, was saying publicly that the Afghan military was not going to collapse and that there was little danger of the Taliban sweeping across the country.
The United States is so powerful that it tends to get involved in wars on literally the far side of the world, places like Iraq and Afghanistan. When the U. Donald Rumsfeld wrote in his memoirs that the U. I was shocked in , at the height of the Iraq War, there were a thousand Americans in the U. Embassy in Baghdad, but only six of them spoke Arabic. This type of ignorance is deadly in these kinds of complex foreign conflicts.
The remarkable thing about the Taliban advance is that it has been largely bloodless. The Taliban has made these deals with Afghan army commanders.
The Taliban has a far greater understanding of these local networks and kin relationships and the complex loyalties. The war was basically an alien war for America. It may as well have been on the moon. Your framework describes a scenario where things go from crusade to quagmire. Was there a specific turning point in Afghanistan where the United States went from a noble fight rooted in justice and righteousness to just an unwinnable disaster? It never was that righteous war.
And so the U. But as the war goes on and it turns into this complex, difficult nation-building mission with counterinsurgency, American righteousness tends to be replaced by this weariness. He is very savvy about foreign policy and generally is aware of the complexities of it. And so you have the United States on one side that is going through this extraordinary shift from utter righteousness to weariness, and then the Taliban is much more constant in its view of the war.
And over time that will give it an advantage. One of the great tragedies of the Afghanistan war is that the United States could have got a much better result back in by negotiating a deal with the Taliban. The Bush Administration did not even consider it because at the time al-Qaeda and the Taliban were sort of lumped together in this bucket of Bad Guys, Evildoers, Nazis almost. If we had just had a little less righteousness in and a little more pragmatism and savviness about how the war was going to go and how there was not going to be an easy victory, then maybe we could have cut a deal, and at far lower costs for America and for Afghanistan.
Presidents convince themselves that the next time will be different. The lesson Obama took from Iraq was not to allow any US ground forces to get involved in nation-building. Since Obama was willing to support regime change, the end result was going to be the overthrow of Qaddafi with no real plan to stabilize Libya.
If a thoughtful president like Obama — who was very cognizant of the errors of Iraq — can do that, it suggests that any president would be capable of doing that.
How do we solve that? We need better language training, cultural training, more resources for special forces — and that would mean less money spent on nuclear attack submarines, for example. That means when we do fight, we have a better plan to win the peace. The US military is good at taking out bad guys.
But the removal of the bad guy creates a power vacuum, and that power vacuum is filled by somebody else. And in Iraq, the vacuum was filled by militant groups, most notably al-Qaeda in Iraq. In Libya, the vacuum was filled by a complicated range of militant groups.
The Trump administration says it will pay less attention to defeating terrorists and will now focus more on battling back growing Chinese and Russian power. Does this preparation for a different style of war — while still fighting another — put the US in an awkward position?
There is a desire to shift from difficult nation-building missions toward countering great-power challengers like Russia and especially China.
The Obama administration wanted to pivot to Asia and the China challenge. And then what happened? We ended up being engaged against ISIS. I tend to think that the pivot to China is sort of like Waiting for Godot — it never arrives.
And I think the United States is going to get drawn back into these civil wars and these kinds of messy conflicts, particularly in the broader Middle East.
The odds of conflict between the US and China are very low; the odds of the US engaging in another civil war in the next five years are extremely high. Based on this conversation, victory in war seems to be how we define it, or, rather, will it to be.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Former President George W. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. Alex Ward During his first year in office, Trump got the US more deeply involved in wars, with the goal of defeating terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia. Dominic Tierney Victory may be asking a lot.
But will he channel that observation into winning wars?
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