The futility of war, from Vietnam to Afghanistan

Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, took her seat in the House of Representatives in 1917. A Republican, she was also a pacifist who voted against US involvement in both the First and Second World Wars. Rankin’s pacifism was such that she was the only member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan after Pearl Harbour. She summed up her view of military action in the famous phrase: “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake”.

It’s a good line, and in the immediate aftermath of the US’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos that has taken hold, including yesterday’s bombings at Kabul airport, it is one that rings loud in the ears. But is it true? Could the US or Britain ever win outright military victory in a modern conflict, or is the outcome of war always equivocal? Looking back over the major wars fought by western powers since the end of the Second World War, it is hard to find any examples of outright victory. The West’s wars, it seems, always end in disorder, or worse. When this is understood, the current debacle in Afghanistan appears not the exception but the rule.

The British exit from Palestine in 1948 was, as with Afghanistan in 2021, a withdrawal by a western power carried out entirely in its own interests and in the full knowledge that its departure would lead to war. Britain had become embroiled in a counterinsurgency conflict in the Holy Land for which it was entirely unprepared and which Churchill called, in a speech to the Commons, “a senseless, squalid war”.

In Palestine, Britain’s military confronted an opponent whose incentive to fight was much greater than its own. The Jewish nationalist partisans were fighting to create a new homeland. The British had no comparable objective. That imbalance of motives repeats with remarkable regularity throughout the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A western military force faces an enemy with a far greater incentive, not only to fight, but to fight on; an opponent who cannot withdraw on account of already being on home soil. It is impossible for the armed forces of a democratic state to match that degree of commitment.

At the same time as the British were fighting in Palestine, the French were at war in Indochina. After VJ Day, President Truman made perhaps his second most consequential decision, which was to allow the Vichy-aligned French colonial government in Indochina to remain in place, even though it had collaborated with the occupying Japanese.

The Vietnamese nationalists, who had regarded the Americans as their allies, assumed that Japanese defeat would mean independence from France. In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh stood in central Hanoi and read the Vietnamese Declaration on Independence, which he had drafted with the help of American officers of the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. The American influence was clear from the speech’s opening line, which read, almost unbelievably: “All people are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Ho was making an appeal directly to the US President — but Truman wasn’t listening. The French were allowed back in to Vietnam, and the result was the First Indochina War, fought between the French colonial army and the Vietnamese nationalists. It ended in disaster for the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a forested valley in the north west of the country, where the French constructed a fortified airbase with the aim of luring the enemy into open confrontation.

The disaster that unfolded around that far-flung airstrip holds terrible lessons for the situation in Kabul. Airports, with their huge, open runways, slow taxiing planes and low, regular flight paths are impossible to secure so long as the surrounding area is controlled by a hostile force. Approaching aircraft are highly vulnerable to ground fire. A single mortar strike on the runway makes takeoff and landing impossible. From then on, your people on the ground are stuck. They cannot be extracted or resupplied.

That is what happened at Dien Bien Phu. The French airfield was surrounded by the Viet Minh and crushed. Just under 12,000 French troops were taken captive in a defeat that ended France’s presence in the Far East. It was also a defeat for the US, which had financed the operation at Dien Bien Phu and provided the specialist pilots needed to service the air base. At the Geneva peace conference that followed, the world powers agreed to divide Vietnam into a western-aligned South and a Communist North, with a guarantee of nationwide elections to follow.

But there were no elections. Instead, there was a slow slide towards confrontation and eventually, in 1965, outright war between north and south, with the US providing the bulk of South Vietnam’s fighting capability. The justification for the US presence in Vietnam was that it was fighting Communism. But the US had, unwittingly, joined in with another nation’s civil war. Once again, a western military force was up against an opponent with a far greater incentive to fight.

When the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975, and the helicopters were picking the last few US personnel off the embassy roof — just as in Kabul — it brought to an end a war that the Vietnamese nationalists had been fighting for over thirty years. No western army could ever have matched that longevity. The US was in Afghanistan for twenty years, long enough, it seems, to exhaust all political willingness to carry on.

Vietnam was a catastrophic defeat for France, which would go on to lose a similar colonial war in Algeria. The Americans inherited Vietnam from the French, just as they would later inherit a broken Afghanistan from the Soviets. Both wars ended in disaster for the US. Looking back over all of these engagements — in Palestine, Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan, not to mention Suez — none ended in success for the West.

What of the West’s other wars? The Korean War led to the creation of a prosperous south, but also gave us a nuclear-armed, totalitarian north, which is, at best, a partial success. Could the First Iraq War be regarded as a victory? It may have pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, but a war that leads directly to a second conflict is hardly a victory. The Second Iraq War shattered the country, triggered a hideous sectarian civil war and an upsurge in extremism that led to the formation of Isis, who went on to ravage northern Iraq and Syria. Again, that is no victory.

In the light of all these failures, perhaps the disaster in Afghanistan should be less of a shock. Since 1945, no western power has ever invaded another country, subdued the enemy, successfully built a new society and then withdrawn to see that society flourish. It has never happened. Afghanistan is just the latest example.

So why does the West go into combat convinced that it can do what history shows it cannot? It is the legacy of the Second World War and the self-image that we in the West have created around that victory that lies behind this willingness to fight. The defeat of Nazism is central not only to British and US identity, but to the notion of “the West” itself. But the sheer enormity of that victory is counter-productive, as it becomes the historical analogue against which all other conflicts are measured. That is a recipe for self-delusion.

In a 2006 speech defending his policy on the Iraq war, delivered to veterans in Salt Lake City, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, recalled how, throughout the 1930s, “those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — they were ridiculed or ignored.”

“Indeed, in the decades before World War Two,” Rumsfeld said, “a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear.”

“I recount that history because, once again, we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.”

Saddam was odious, but he was no Hitler and at this distance, Rumsfeld’s comparison between Iraq and Nazi Germany seems absurd. But in his remarks Rumsfeld revealed the deep sense of moral righteousness that western leaders derive from that victory of 1945. They point to the history books, and say, “we were right then, so we are right now”. But in so many cases, including Iraq, they were not.

Jeanette Rankin would not have been surprised by the West’s failure in Afghanistan. She almost certainly would have voted against the invasion. But even though her earthquake epigram sticks in the mind, her total pacifism is hard to accept. After the outrage of 9/11, it would have been impossible for the US to remain passive and accepting of events.

When the coalition invaded Afghanistan the initial phases were a success. Al Qaeda was scattered and the Taliban government overthrown. The central aim of the invasion, to strike against the perpetrators of 9/11, was achieved. The social improvements that occurred in Afghan society were remarkable and welcome, especially the improvements in the status of women. Those social achievements cannot be dismissed and the Taliban will not necessarily be able to reverse all of them.

But these are crumbs of comfort. We cannot escape the truth of it — that in recent weeks, we have been witness to a catastrophe, one that will do irreparable harm to the West’s reputation. Russia will have watched the pullout from Kabul with perhaps a twinge of familiarity — and schadenfreude. China will also have been paying close attention.

The assumption has been that China and Russia will be emboldened by the West’s failure in Afghanistan. Beijing is itching to invade Taiwan and Putin has unfinished business in Ukraine and both will now feel more willing to assert themselves. But they might equally see the US withdrawal as a warning: a reminder that no matter how big and powerful you are, invasion is the easy part. It is the task of rebuilding society in your own likeness that is so hard, especially when a substantial section of the population doesn’t like you and doesn’t want to be your likeness. In this way, Afghanistan could end up reducing the global appetite for large-scale operations by showing how they almost always end in disaster.

If that is the outcome, then global opinion would have moved closer to Rankin’s “earthquake” view of war. It would be a welcome change. But in the meantime, it is the innocent people of Kabul, and of Afghanistan, who suffer.

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