Afghanistan/Vietnam--What Cost "Winning"?

“Newsweek Magazine” this week ran the headline “How We [could have] Won In Vietnam”. The article inside, on page 34, is essentially a review of a recent book by a retired Lieutenant Colonial, Lewis Sorley, who penned A BETTER WAR to show how we could have won in Vietnam.
His recipe: more bombing earlier and/or staying the course in the early seventies—if only Congress hadn’t cut off the funds—or if LBJ hadn’t been afraid of a wider war (ala Korea with China). But the line that caught my eye in “Newsweek” was, that Sorley’s notion that we could have won in Vietnam is “is contrary to the conventional wisdom. ,,,”
The comparison is being made to our present “quagmire” in Afghanistan—which some are also calling an unwinnable war. Please, ladies and gentlemen, admirals and generals, historians and policy makers—the issue was never if we COULD have won—either place. The real question is: can we afford to?
I’m sure neither Khrushchev, Mao, Ho Chi Minh nor Castro ever doubted that we COULD win in Vietnam. The only question was whether it was worth what it would take to do it. How many bombs did we want to drop on Haiphong harbor (how many Russian ships did we want to sink)?
How many troops did we really want to commit? Here’s a dirty little secret I’ve been told by men who were there, while half a million G.I.s sounds impressive on paper, as much as 90% functioned as non-combatant “tail”. That’s drivers, engineers, supply corps, cooks, etc. etc.
I remember asking a recruiting sergeant in liberal, anti-war Massachusetts how he got recruits. “Simple,” he grinned. “I tell kids they can wait to be drafted, get handed a rifle and lose an arm or a leg—or they can enlist and become a company clerk or cook. Given that option, a lot of them enlist. I meet my quota.”
What if we had turned things around—like European armies? Twenty or 30%--or less—as tail and the bulk of that half million as full time combat troops? That would seem to have made victory far more possible. But even that would not have been enough.
We were battling a determined enemy who were ready to die to throw what they saw as foreign tyranny out of their country. They had already fought the Japanese to a standstill and whipped the French. They were fighting (much more fanatically than we did in 1776) for their own independence, their own nation.
We had about two million Catholic French colons reliably on our side. The other 15 million SOUTH Vietnamese were at least secretly on the side of the man most of them saw as the George Washington of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.
Could we have beaten Ho? Yes, we owned more resources than Japan and France combined. But we would have had to use vastly more of them than would have been politically palatable to the most determined Washington hawk. We would have had to use them with the totality and ruthlessness we had not shown since the Civil War or World War II.
Was Vietnam worth that? We certainly had the raw power and weaponry to kill anything and any one that tried to defy us. Did we have the will? Were we willing to spend that many or our own boys and cash to do it? That’s the issue Sorley misses.
The conventional wisdom against which he writes is in a sense correct: We could not win in Vietnam with the resources we were willing to commit—and with only a half-hearted ruthlessness. We weren’t willing (wisely, I believe) to pay what it would have required. And, thus, we should have stayed out of a war we weren’t willing to fight to win. (Not being willing is NOT the same as cowardice—sometimes it’s simply being wise.)
Now, how about Afghanistan? What’s it worth? How ruthless are we willing to be? Genghis Khan butchered whole cities full of civilians to pacify the Afghans. He’s the only one who ever did—are we willing to be like him? Are we willing to send enough men and firepower to do the job?
These are the questions Obama faces. I’m glad I don’t have to.