–  Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –

Prophetic words they were not. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all…The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

Thus spoke a euphoric President George H.W.Bush early in March, 1991, shortly after the 100-hour ground war that chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the oil-rich U.S. ally they had invaded and occupied in the summer of 1990.

The specter of Vietnam, far from being buried in the Arabian sands, has risen again as President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering the course of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year, increasingly unpopular, and considered unwinnable even by America’s senior soldiers if it is fought alongside a corrupt government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

That the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well is obvious by the proliferation of analyses and commentaries drawing parallels, or dismissing them as nonsense, since Obama declared Afghanistan a war of necessity. (Type “Is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam” into the Google search box and you get more than nine million references).

The cover of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine is taken up by an iconic photograph of the Vietnam war, people clambering up a ladder to a U.S. helicopter waiting to evacuate them off the roof of a Saigon building the day before the city fell to communist forces on April 30, 1975. The story inside: what to learn from the lessons of Vietnam.

The answers to that question differ widely and the Vietnam analogy has come up routinely whenever the United States resorted to military action in the past three decades, from Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq.  Obama himself has dismissed the parallel.

“You never step into the same river twice,” he said in October, “and so, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But the danger of overreach and not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues I think about all the time.”

Both in scale and geopolitical context the difference between the two conflicts is vast: at the height of its involvement in Vietnam, the United States had more than half a million troops there, fighting both Viet Cong insurgents and North Vietnamese army regulars who could count on aid from China and the Soviet Union.

In Afghanistan, the United States has some 68,000 soldiers, a number that is likely to grow to 100,000 or more (depending on what decision on reinforcement is taken) by the end of Obama’s term. Neither the Taliban insurgents nor al-Qaeda can count on the kind of outside support America’s antagonists in Vietnam commanded. In Vietnam, more than 58,000 soldiers died. The U.S. death toll in Afghanistan stood at 916 in the first week of November.

VIETNAM SYNDROME AND FLAGGING SUPPORT

But there are also parallels, and the Vietnam syndrome the elder President Bush had declared kicked is doubtless one of the reasons why public support for the war in Afghanistan has been declining steadily, despite Obama’s assertion that the American commitment would not be open-ended. The latest poll, by CNN, showed that 58 percent of those questioned were opposed to war.

And the parallels? In the words of Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who turned into a war critic after his deployment, “Once again, our enemy blends in with the local population and finds sanctuary in a neighboring country. Once again, the danger of being perceived as an occupying force by a war-weary population remains perilous.

“With Afghanistan, as with Vietnam, we have a president facing pressure from the military.”
President Lyndon Johnson, Kerry wrote, failed to stand up to his military commanders when they warned that the U.S. was facing defeat without additional forces - the argument that the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal made when he put forward options to Obama, including up to 40,000 more troops.

History does not repeat itself but the similarities between Obama in 2009 and Johnson in 1963 are striking. Both inherited a war that became their own at a time when they were pushing far-reaching and costly domestic reforms. Johnson’s Great Society programs ranged from reducing poverty to improving medical care. Obama’s key project is universal health care.

Most of Johnson’s reforms were enacted in the first two years of his presidency, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. By 1968, the war in Vietnam had eroded his popularity to such an extent that he decided not to run for re-election.

The House of Representatives passed Obama’s health care bill this month, the Senate is expected to vote on its version soon. Polls show Obama’s popularity has been slipping, though his approval rate is still above 50%. Where it will be in a year’s time, halfway through his term when the U.S. goes to the polls for mid-term elections, will partly depend on how the war in Afghanistan is going.

The ghost of Vietnam hangs over the White House.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com.

If you were on the U.S-led coalition base in Bagram in Afghanistan soon after the 2001 invasion, you couldn't help noticing soldiers with long, Taliban-style beards and dressed in light brown shalwar kamaeez down to the sandals.

They kept to themselves. They weren't the friendly sort and before long you figured out these were the Special Forces who had fought along side the Northern Alliance in small teams to overthrow the Taliban and were then hunting its remnants and members of al Qaeda. The men grew beards to blend in during difficult and isolated missions in the Afghan countryside.

Close up, on the base some people thought looked like a little bit of America with its mountains of food, gym, and the easy banter of men and women soldiers, the Western men with the flowing beards stood out.

Eight years on, the Special Forces ops are still trying to master the disguise. But the men are still no closer to ordinary Afghans. In fact, the locals have grown to be especially wary of the Special Forces as this article on the Foreign Policy website says. The beards apparently only serve to allow ordinary people to distinguish them from regular U.S. and allied military units.

In Kandahar province's Zhari district, elders refer to the "bearded Americans," who they say behave very badly, and the "shaven Americans," who aren't so bad, the article says. Likewise, in Uruzgan province, locals have complained about "bearded Americans" using foul language and manhandling respected community elders and government officials.

Of course not all the members of the Special Forces go around with beards and not all the regular troops are clean shaven.  And to paint them as Rambo-types would be equally inaccurate, most of them are probably unassuming men, chosen as much for their mental as their physical aptitude.

But because they undertake the most dangerous and controversial missions, they tend to take much of the flak. They are involved in the capture and killing of al Qaeda and Taliban figures, which apart from causing civilian casualties also brings them in close contact with Afghan society at sensitive times. "Special operations forces, for example, perform late-night raids of Afghan homes, a deeply humiliating and dishonorable event in the local culture -- in particular, the searching of women's quarters," the article says.

It has been written by Anthony Bubalo, the programme director for West Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and Susanne Schmeidl a co-founder of the Liaison Office, an Afghan nongovernmental organization that since 2003 has worked with tribes in southeast and southern Afghanistan on governance, stability, and security.

The renewed focus on the Special Forces is important because of the ongoing debate on whether the United States should embrace the idea of a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign with its population-centric strategy as advocated by General Stanley A. McChrystal or counterterrorism as Vice President Joe Biden argues. In that scenario there would be greater use of Special Forces and unmanned drones to disrupt al Qaeda.

One Special Forces major  who spent time both in Afghanistan and Iraq has written a paper arguing that one way way to undermine the Afghan insurgency is to return in part to the strategy that ousted the Taliban in the first place: embed small, highly skilled and almost completely autonomous units with tribes across Afghanistan.

Much like the men who worked with the Northern Alliance in 2001, the unit which Major. Jim Gant calls Tribal Engagement Teams, would wear Afghan garb and live in Afghan villages for extended periods, training, equipping and fighting alongside tribal militias.

Here's his 45-page paper called One Tribe at a Time that has kicked off much debate.

Just as the Sunni tribesmen, dubbed the Sons of Iraq, turned against foreign al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, Major Gant argues that the Tribal Engagement Teams can counter al-Qaeda networks in Afghanistan by creating or strengthening indigenous fighting forces built upon local militias.

[Pictures at the Bagram air base and Afghan women walking in front of a U.S. soldier]

The following piece was co-written by Matthew Alexander, Joe Navarro and Lieutenant General Robert Gard (USA-Ret.) They are pictured from left to right.

Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a special operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism expert, is an adjunct faculty member at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.

Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA-Ret.) is president emeritus at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and a senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

The views expressed are their own.

President Obama decided not to release a new group of detainee abuse photographs because he believes they would inflame our enemies and threaten American troops. Indeed, the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib have served as a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and have sparked outrage across the world.

It is not the release of the photos, however, that would elicit horror and anger. It is their brutal content and the misguided policies they reflect. The controversy surrounding the photos and the president’s release of four Department of Justice memos have brought into sharp focus a debate that has been in the shadows of public discourse for several years: Should the U.S. include torture and cruelty in its counterterrorism arsenal?

Since it has become clear that the U.S. authorized and carried out a torture program, defenders of the policy have repeated half-truths and outright deceptions about its effectiveness. In 2007, CIA officer John Kiriakou appeared on ABC News claiming waterboarding broke senior al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in “30, 35 seconds.” Kiriakou’s statements were widely reported and used to portray waterboarding as a harmless procedure despite the fact that he had no first-hand knowledge of Zubaydah’s interrogation—he wasn’t even in the same country when it occurred.

Former FBI agent Ali Soufan contradicted these and other false claims in a Senate hearing on interrogation practices. Experienced interrogators like Soufan prefer to use a technique that relies on “outwitting the detainee by using a combination of interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional strategies to get the information needed.”

Soufan testified that by interrogating Zubaydah using this approach, he obtained valuable intelligence in less than an hour. Further, when another interrogation team introduced harsher techniques, Zubaydah “shut down and stopped talking.” Al Qaeda members, Soufan explained, are trained to withstand torture.

The reality is Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. This puts a serious hole in the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario that advocates of torture repeatedly return to.

As the validity of such justifications is repeatedly dismissed, attempts to rationalize torture are getting increasingly desperate. At last month’s hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claimed, “one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.” To which Ali Soufan responded, “Because, sir, there’s a lot of people who don’t know how to interrogate, and it’s easier to hit somebody than outsmart them.”

Among policymakers and the public, there appears to be a fundamental, widespread misunderstanding of how effective interrogation works. Senator Graham questioned Professor David Luban about exploiting a detainee’s phobia of spiders. The experts—who have spent years interrogating the toughest, most dangerous people in the world—know that smart interrogation is not about terrorizing detainees.

We should be careful not to overlook other forceful reasons for not using torture. The public debate often disregards—to the detriment of the U.S. interests—the profound damage done by violating U.S. law and international legal obligations prohibiting not only torture but even cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Our prestige and power, our respect for the rule of law and respect for the rights of humankind are inextricably tied to preserving America’s ideals.

The most critical aspect of this scandal, especially in terms of immediate implications for our national security, has to do with the international community. Our relationships with long-standing and vital allies have been greatly strained. With the rising influence of non-state actors and an ever-increasing level of interdependence and unpredictability amongst nations, the need for trusted partners has never been greater; this is especially evident with regards to the threat of terrorism and the strength of extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Throughout our history, the values that we protected—respect for our common humanity and the rule of law—set a standard to which the rest of the world aspired. As Senator John McCain said, “[T]his isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are.”

Regaining our moral leadership in the international community is contingent on publicly—and unmistakably—casting aside a policy and strategy that flouts our laws and corrupts our values. We must continue to lead where we want others to follow by demonstrating that our principles and our practices are indistinguishable from one another.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Barack Obama says he will make Afghanistan the central front in his fight against terrorism but the incoming U.S. president will have to scale back the war aims he inherits from George W. Bush and redefine success.

Bush ordered the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 to oust a Taliban government that was harboring al Qaeda militants blamed for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

His declared goals were to defeat the Taliban, create a stable democracy and promote economic development, but he turned his attention quickly to Iraq before the task was done.

Since 2005, a revived Taliban insurgency has made growing inroads against understaffed U.S., NATO and Afghan forces, while President Hamid Karzai’s ineffective government has been mired in corruption and a booming illegal drugs trade.

The most Obama can hope to achieve in a mountainous country that wore down British and Soviet invaders is probably an ethnic power-sharing pact, including tribes that now help the Taliban, in hopes of keeping al Qaeda at bay once Western forces leave.

That is far from assured and would require cooperation from a weak Pakistani government transfixed by tension with India.

NATO officials see 2009 as crucial to turning the military and political tide before some allies start to withdraw in 2010.

“The basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban; it’s too little good governance,” NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer wrote in a Washington Post article on Sunday.

“We have paid enough, in blood and treasure, to demand that the Afghan government take more concrete and vigorous action to root out corruption and increase efficiency, even where that means difficult political choices,” he said.

Yet despite disenchantment with Karzai, no alternative leader is in sight with a presidential election due in September.

PROSPECT REMOTE

Asked in a Reuters interview last July what would constitute success in Afghanistan, Obama said: “I think our goals have to be very modest but they will still be very difficult to meet. We should want a functioning Afghan government that can maintain its own security and territorial integrity.

“…Our highest priority is making sure that the Taliban and al Qaeda can’t continue to use that region from which to launch attacks around the world. If we have routed them and scattered them, that would be success,” he said.

Despite plans to send up to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to reinforce the 32,000 already in Afghanistan, of whom about half serve in the 50,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, the prospect of routing the Taliban is remote.

Without extra forces, the West risks “a stalemate situation where we are not losing, but also not winning,” says De Hoop Scheffer.

NATO casualties rose by 34 percent last year, fueling public and parliamentary unease in many allied nations. Long, vulnerable supply lines from Pakistan to land-locked Afghanistan are under attack.

Attacks on Afghan government property and personnel were up by 134 percent and civilian casualties by 50 percent.

The British military is gloomy about security in the southern province of Helmand, where it is in the front line.

The Taliban are gaining public support, partly due to anger over civilian casualties from NATO air strikes. Despite heavy losses, they seem to have no problem recruiting fighters.

Sensing that time is on their side, Taliban leaders see little interest in local reconciliation talks offered by Kabul.

Karzai, stung by the civilian toll and perhaps with one eye on the elections, has been increasingly outspoken in criticism of foreign troops, further undermining public support for their presence and aggravating mistrust with his Western backers.

On a visit to Berlin last July, Obama challenged NATO allies to do more, saying the United States and Germany had a stake in seeing NATO’s first mission outside Europe succeed.

But European allies are unlikely to send more troops, and NATO officials expect Obama to present a shopping list of requests for police training, financial and development assistance, as well as military equipment such as helicopters, to avoid a public failure at his first alliance summit in April.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the key to success lies in Afghan public support and “Afghanisation” of the war. That requires accelerated training of the Afghan army and police and enrolling some tribal militias as security forces.

The European Union could do more than its present paltry 200 police trainers. But after pledging to double that number, it is having difficulty finding volunteers.

Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, veteran Pakistani expert Ahmed Rashid and U.S. Afghan specialist Barnett Rubin said: “The goal of the next U.S. president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for ‘victory’ as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents or enemies in diplomacy.”

They advocated a major diplomatic initiative involving India, Iran, Russia and China in a regional “contact group” to stabilize both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

General David Petraeus, who changed U.S. tactics in Iraq to roll back a Sunni insurgency, has advocated such a regional political approach in Afghanistan, and veteran troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke may lead that diplomatic drive.

But Obama has little time to find a more effective combination of military pressure and diplomatic incentives to avoid being ground down in Afghanistan.

For previous columns by Paul Taylor, click here.

– Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. The views expressed are his own. –

The brazen Mumbai terrorist assaults are just the latest example of how the world’s largest democracy is increasingly coming under siege from the forces of terror.

The attacks, which bear the hallmark of al Qaeda, are also a reminder to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama that even as he seeks to deal with the financial meltdown, the global war on terror stands derailed, with the scourge of terrorism having spread deeper and wider.

International terrorism threatens the very existence of democratic, secular states. Yet the U.S. occupation of Iraq not only helped fracture the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror, but also handed a fresh cause to Islamists and gave a new lease of life to al Qaeda.

The Obama administration will need to bring the anti-terror war back on course by building a new international consensus.

The Mumbai attacks were exceptionally brazen and daring, even when viewed against the high level of terrorism now tormenting India. Indeed, since 9/11, the world has not witnessed terrorism on this scale or level of sophistication and coordination.

The most troubling questions arising from the latest terrorist attacks - the eighth in a spate of attacks in India in the past five months - relate to why the country has become an easy target for terrorists.

Transnational terrorists, including those tied to Al Qaeda, are waging an open war on India, yet the Indian leadership is unable to declare a war on terror.

What the country needs is a credible counterterror campaign. But what its harried citizens get after each major terrorist attack are stock platitudes, such as a commitment to defeat the designs of terrorist forces. Empty rhetoric is eating into the vitals of internal security.

Indeed, after the government’s ritual condemnation of each attack and the standard promise to defeat terror, India puts the strikes behind it and goes back to what now defines it - partisan politics and scandal. That is, until terror strikes again.

Worse, the fight against terror has been increasingly politicized and got linked to communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations.

Combating terror demands at least four different elements — a well-thought-out strategy, effective state instruments to implement that strategy, a credible legal framework to speedily bring terrorists to justice, and unflinching political resolve to stay the course.

India is deficient on all four.

Unlike other important victims of terror in the world, India has no published counterterror doctrine. And a retiring Chief Justice of India was compelled to remind fellow citizens that, “We don’t have the political will to fight terrorism”.

Weak leadership, political one-upmanship and an ever-shifting policy approach indeed have spurred on more terrorism. Not a single case of terrorist attack in recent years has been cracked, yet in the Malegaon bombing probe, the nation has witnessed the bizarre spectacle of authorities deliberately leaking tidbits of information on a daily basis.

Indian system has become so effete that terrorists have again exposed the woeful lack of adequate training and preparedness on the part of those tasked to fight terror. Such was the level of police ineptitude that several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the anti-terrorism squad head, were killed soon after the terrorists struck. As a result, the army had to be called in to deal with the situation.

Against this background, India serves as an exemplar of how not to fight terror. In fact, through its forbearing approach, the country has come to accept terrorist strikes as the ostensible products of its unalterable geography or destiny.

Its response to the jihadist strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts has been survival by a thousand bandages. Just as it has come to brook a high level of political corruption, it is willing to put up with a high incidence of terrorism.

Turning this appalling situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India to be continually gored. That in turn means a readiness to forge a bipartisan consensus to do whatever is necessary to end the terrorist siege of the country.

Will Israel and India -- the first the United States' closest ally and the second fast becoming one of the closest -- emerge as the trickiest adversaries in any attempt by the United States to seek a regional solution to Afghanistan?

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan — including possible talks with Iran.

The idea has been fashionable among foreign policy analysts for a while, as I have discussed in previous posts here and here. The aim would be to capitalise on Shi'ite Iran's traditional hostility to the hardline brand of Sunni Islam espoused by the Taliban and al Qaeda to seek its help in neighbouring Afghanistan. At the same time India would be encouraged to make peace with Pakistan over Kashmir to end a cause of tension that has underpinned the rise of Islamist militancy in Pakistan and left both countries vying for influence in Afghanistan.

But Israel has already cautioned Obama against talking to Iran, which it said would be a seen as a sign of weakness in efforts to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear programme. And Obama's suggestion that the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute has raised hackles in India, which resents any outside interference in what it sees as a bilateral dispute. That could make the two countries important allies in combating -- or at least reshaping -- any attempt to remould U.S. strategy. 

India and Israel have already built close defence ties, as underlined by this Times of India article.  And according to this Asia Times article by former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, India's growing relationship with Israel, combined with U.S. pressure, is pushing Delhi to break off what was once a strategic partnership with Tehran. "At the root of it lies unprecedented US-Israeli interference in India's Iran policy," he writes.

Are we going to see more signs of Israel and India working together -- if necessary to resist rather than support U.S. policy? And in an increasingly multi-polar world, will Obama discover that he needs to watch the United States' friends as closely as its enemies to drive through his plans for change?