Vietnam & the Afghanistan Papers: a Comparison.

last things first the comparison between
the Vietnam War and the United States and it's still ongoing endeavor to conquer and occupy Afghanistan the comparison between the two is flawed because the reality of what happened in Vietnam is that the United States won militarily but was completely defeated politically whereas in Afghanistan the United States has won politically but has been defeated militarily the context of this video is that in just the last few days the Western press has been jumping all over quote-unquote the Afghanistan papers and even the naming of these papers the naming of them as such is an intentional allusion to comparison to the Pentagon Papers that came out during the Vietnam War and it is somewhat bizarre that the main complaint being made by the Western media is that the public the general public in America were lied to about what had been happening in Afghanistan I think most of my viewers will agree with me I'm not saying everyone was just the type of people who watch my channel for politics for me there were absolutely no surprises you people feel you've been lied to this is exactly what I've been reading in the last 10 years and more you know this is this is all very familiar to me this is what I was again maybe we have been reading the same news source or something but the type of reflections the types of meditations on the US military's lack of success in Afghanistan none of this was shocking are new to me none of it was really even a contrast to the type of reporting and analysis I've become accustomed to on Afghanistan I have a very strong memory now when the United States was ten years into the war in Afghanistan there was a report where the journalist was standing next to the most senior general the highest-ranking commander on the American side in Afghanistan and that a big map rolled out the table and the general was explaining how ten years into the combat ten years they were fighting to try to secure basic supply lines basic row for trade and transport in and out of the capital city in Afghanistan and he was explaining how you know if they can just achieve this in the next few months or next few years then it will be possible for farmers in Afghanistan to stop farming opium and instead start farming other crops because the thing is but opium is it doesn't require refrigeration it doesn't require that you transport it rapidly you know you can you can wait a long time to ship opium slowly but he was saying once once the Taliban is driven off these roads then farming will flourish and democracy will flourish and everyone's gonna support the American installed there and I was just laughing and laughing I was laughing out loud because this was being presented to the audience as like news of victory like news that the war was going well like no no when you're ten years into the war and you can't drive between the only two cities that the country has Afghanistan doesn't have that many booming metropolis when like you know there only are about three highways you're in the whole country that you need to secure and you haven't secured any of those three highways you know like guys this is not victory if this is news of defeat this is showing you be ongoing defeat fully ten years into the war with a trillion dollar budget and I think the same thing could basically be said today you know of course in some ways things have changed but so to say I I don't feel I've been lied to it may be that I'm reading very different sort of news than the average person is getting excited about so-called what's going to say Pentagon Papers this so-called Afghanistan papers all right so when we understand a conflict the question of what we compare it to historically matters morally it matters ethically it matters in how we receive the news of the cost of war and how we rationalize the cost of war so to give an example here the Tet Offensive in Vietnam I think everyone watching this video who is older than 50 years old will immediately know what I talk about when I say the Tet Offensive and everyone who is younger than 50 you either don't know or that's something my grandfather mentioned one right the Tet Offensive was remembered as a victory for the Vietnamese side that is a lie quantitatively qualitatively in military terms in tactical terms and futures in all those palpable real-world ways the American side won the Tet Offensive they caused unbelievable casualties to the communist side and the Communists I didn't attain any of its sort of checklist of objectives what it was they were trying to actual the targets they were trying to actually conquer however the Vietnamese side won a political victory the photographs of the sorrow and suffering and death and carnage and even the poverty that came back the United States of America from the Tet Offensive the American public couldn't rationalize them they couldn't justify them in their own minds morally it was seen as disgraceful what America had done in cinnaminson so this is very important the American side was discredited not by its military defeat but by its military victory in the Tet Offensive okay the Americans did not lose the actual combat and now you just scale it up in round numbers with the American war in Vietnam you're talking about over 1 million deaths on the Communist side pardon me the pro-communist side over 1 million deaths and when you get into the numbers the problem is are you just talking about combat deaths are you talking about civilian deaths and this kind of thing but in any case we're well over a million in the calculus on that side and on the pro-american side is it even 60,000 deaths again there are you have a footnote here within a long list of considerations for how who gets counted these deaths do you include people fighting over the border in Cambodia and Laos and you know do you include tribal people in the highlands who signed up to fight for the wrench and then continued fighting against the communists and we're never really on the American side there are actually some really strange footnotes when you get into deals doing the map but the point is here in general the number of deaths on the pro-communist side is unbelievably greater than the number of deaths within the American armed forces and even on the American allied side right so you can look at the Vietnam War in sort of purely tactical sense as a victory for the American army and yet of course this is one of the most important defeats for the United States of America in the entire history of the country is you know devastating transformative defeat the United States America they lost politically you know they could have seen this coming the United States had a war in the Philippines that nobody likes to talk about anymore that war started around 1899 or 1900 1901 when the war starts you know he can kind of pick a different point the time line I remember it as 1899 when exactly the you know combat starts to escalate he's got another question but right about there the United States thought of war in the Philippines and the current conclusions from the American side or that the Americans killed more than 1 million people in the Philippines at that time conquering the Philippines did the Americans win this again it's kind of a similar question can anyone possibly look back at the American war in the Philippines and think of it as a victory 10 Estates in in many important ways it was a devastating demoralizing loss for America it was a moment when America had to look in the mirror and behold in its own reflection a type of ruthless imperialism right it was it very deeply shook the moral foundations of American democracy that admittedly were somewhat moral shaky basis anyway due to the history of genocide of indigenous people and slavery of african-americans son but nevertheless what they did in the Philippines raised new questions to be answered and those questions could been answered and should have been answered precisely to prevent the kind of horror story of what unfold in the American war in Vietnam but the lesson that was there to be learned in the war in the Philippines is you can kill a million people and either lose the war politically or in a sense win the war would have a completely pure açaí victory have a victory that you regret have a victory where you look back and think wow I wish we'd never fought that war at all another example like this again so this is I'm gonna jump ahead to war in Afghanistan in a second another example is the American military conquest and occupation of Haiti does anyone remember that as a victory and is a horrifying war yes America did conquer Haiti I mean in terms of the number of casualties completely asymmetrical you know and then the United States ruled Haiti as a military dictatorship under the command of the US Marine Corps so this is imperialism in its purest form military imperialism won the United States conquered Haiti alright now again and just to be clear I know this sounds a bit surreal to say it wasn't the case that Haiti had diamond mines or oil fields or some some kind of natural resource for the Americans to plunder right there was no benefit to the United States of America as a democracy or as an empire or something and obviously anyone would look back at that worin Haiti and think wow this was a terrible thing United States America you could say it was a moral defeat even though it was a military victory so there were lessons to be learned here already in in the comparisons earlier than the Vietnam War to the Vietnam War as I've said on this channel before the Americans did not think about Vietnam this way instead the comparisons that provided them with a moral framework for like a picture frame for how they were imagining their purpose there were there their remarkable success in Japan and then the remarkable success in South Korea you could even include here their success in West Germany now what do these three have in common five minutes after America conquered Japan the Japanese public themselves produced a pro-american pro-democracy government it just it all just seemed to come together yes I could nail again we could have a footnote here and we could rest into some of the details the actual constitution of Japan was written by members of the US military staff it's a somewhat strange story but nevertheless Japan had a kind of thriving pro-american democracy five minutes after America conquered the great so this trained the American thing these terms all they had to do was conquer Vietnam and then a pro-american pro-democracy government would would rise up and replace the Taliban in Afghanistan right so sorry I'm mixing up my examples here you can imagine if if the paradigm you're using from American history is their success in Japan or their success in West Germany we're ganna seemingly overnight the Nazis were replaced with a pro-democracy pro-american government they might think oh all that America has to do was conquer Vietnam and then immediately there will be a pro-american pro-democracy government take over Vietnam all that America has to do is march across Afghanistan and then somehow liberate the people Afghanistan to rise up in this and that is of course a completely ridiculous framework to view that war whether you're looking ahead you know looking at the future of that war when it's ongoing or now looking back at the past the last twenty years roughly yeah um so I just say comparisons of this kind they really do matter they're faithful and they have a terrible binding ethical significance now when Americans look back at the war in Haiti when Americans look back at the war in the Philippines and when Americans now look back at the war in Afghanistan maybe the facile and easy conclusion would be to say the only way to win that war would be to not fight the war at all okay certainly a lot of people feel that the American war in Vietnam that the best way for the Americans to have one in Vietnam would be to not fight the war at all well it is a little bit different though because as I've said in Vietnam the Americans won militarily and they lost politically and that included Lou the propaganda war a large part of what people still know about the Vietnam War today was propaganda produced by the Vietnamese themselves and then to some extent propaganda produced by the Soviet Union and by China but a lot of it was created by the Vietnamese people themselves this is not the case at all in Afghanistan I don't think anyone in the Western world is influenced by pro-taliban property it doesn't have this quality nobody in the press is reporting the Taliban version of events as having some kind of equal validity to the American or European version of events and you have to give mind during the Vietnam War that really happened so you know there'd be negotiations and the Americans and the French would be present and then the Soviet Union and China and some representative of the Communist side in Vietnam they would show up and present what they had to say and they made presentations to the Western press to and so on there really was a very successful very compelling propaganda war coming from the Vietnam side PW side and that that also shaped and influenced and galvanized left-wing movements within the United States America had really long-term consequences and you know some of that propaganda was sort of purely aesthetic depicting the poverty of the Vietnamese and their physical smallness compared to these giant you know well-fed Americans you know the Vietnamese people being thin and short and poverty-stricken and the Americans being fat and ruthless and terrible how they depicted things like prostitution and rape and torture and so on being done by the Americans there was this you know very emotionally moving case for the the victimization of Vietnam but the Americans that eroded a moral support for what the Americans were doing and of course the Americans do indeed deserve a significant portion of the blame in this to use just one example condor island also known as a Sandow Island I think CO and Dao kondeh Island you know that was a torture facility that was used by the French the French Empire and then when the Americans began their war in the area they just took over so facility they kept doing the same thing the French Empire been doing in the same building used the same island facility so the idea that the United States of America represented something morally superior to French imperialism before it is challenged by this the French Empire operated a dope-dealing operation you know the opium trade in Vietnam was specifically done by the French military intelligence in the final period of the French Empire there which is say up to and during World War two in that final period of the French Empire their Intelligence Agency was hustling opium what did the CIA do they took over this drug operation so I mean there were many obvious ways in which the United States utterly failed to represent some sort of higher moral standard and the United States found itself defending the use of torture for example I still still see this to this day I see this in new books you know a new writing about the American war in Vietnam people people will point out that the Americans tortured you used torture in in Vietnam and Americans will say back well do you think the communist side was using torture also like you really think we were worse than the communist and they'll give some examples of the conve torture people this is this is just as ridiculous as trying to kind of argue on the basis of moral equality with the Taliban it's like well the Taliban they murder and torture people - okay if you don't represent a dramatically higher standard of ethical conduct then you know the Vietnamese communists or the Taliban then this conversation we're having is it's happening so all right my light motif and my conclusion for this video is this in Afghanistan the Americans didn't lose politically the Americans succeeded politically not just in the propaganda war but in terms of political reality in the capital city and all in all two major cities in Afghanistan they succeeded in creating elections in creating a democracy in creating a Free Press and creating you know newspapers and radio and TV they created this kind of infrastructure for democracy and they created at an enormous expense to the American taxpayer they created a system of education and hospitals and elections and all the components for a very fragile democracy in Afghanistan and politically nobody in the Western world nobody sympathizes with the Taliban instead of this fragile democracy so politically what they did in Afghanistan was in many ways a success and you know they only had a few cards in their deck to play but they played the women's access to education card and they played the democracy card they played these things pretty well so again this is really the opposite of Vietnam where the United States really couldn't they couldn't claim to represent some kind of legitimate democracy and in their occupied area of Vietnam and sona's over a lot long story there so politically both in terms of the real the reality of politics and in terms of the propaganda war America won in Afghanistan but simply put in Afghanistan America had military failure it's a military tactical strategic failure they never won in terms of actually occupying occupying the country or even making the few roads in and out of the capital city safe for trade is there any truth to the claim that the American public were lied to prior to the release of this report the so called Afghanistan papers as I mentioned I don't feel that way I don't think most of my viewers will feel that way I think it's been blatantly obvious to anyone who took even a kind of passing interest in what was happening in the Afghan conflict that America was losing again militarily that they were losing the war and that you know there never was a declaration of victory so to speak what's interesting is that the Afghanistan papers revealed the internal analysis of why they were losing and it shows that many people in the American military had some quite good ideas of what was wrong with the American effort and why they were losing so one of the leading major generals observed meeting is ranked wrong but one of the one of the most senior commanders interviewed he puts great emphasis on the fact that in Congress and in the Senate in the United States almost nobody can read write or speak any Afghan language that within the military in terms of Americans who had learned the languages of Afghanistan even though there are more than ten years into this war they had a small handful he said a small handful of people with language abilities and of course this language ability is very fundamental to all the other kinds of meaningful intelligence and understanding so it's not it doesn't show you what an external intellectual snob like me thinks was wrong with the American war in Afghanistan it shows what you know commanders and generals the the men who fought the war within the Americans said what they thought was wrong with the effort if ganna Stan and in large part they were right they were fighting a cause that was doomed to fail they were using the wrong tactics the wrong methods they had some of the wrong motivations they had people who lacked the crucial skills most obviously and palpably who lacked the language ability that they lacked an understanding of the political situation the culture so on and so forth and the army knew it so again what we have here really is a kind of political failure because evidently in the house of Congress in the Senate and in the White House they were incapable of responding to the news of that failure that was given to them in these same reports the so called Afghanistan papers they were handed this this intelligence hey this is why you point one you're losing the war point two this is why you're losing the war point three here's what you can do about it and they never did take the steps to improve what they were doing and so still today we're stuck with this tragic outcome