Former US defence secretary Robert McNamara raised an issue in his 1995 book on the war in Vietnam that applies today in Afghanistan: What did the president and his senior advisers know about the country in which they intended to wage war before getting the United States deeply engaged?
McNamara, who died a month ago, said In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam: 'When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita.'
He contended: 'Our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance.'
Nonsense. The reservoir of US officials, military officers, diplomats, scholars, and others who knew much about Vietnamese history, culture, and politics was shallow but wide enough to advise US political leaders about what they were getting the nation into.
As former secretary of state Colin Powell wrote in his book, An American Journey, published the same year, Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy, made 'painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into'. Fall was a French correspondent who was killed in Vietnam in 1967.
Mr Powell wrote: 'I cannot help thinking that if president [John] Kennedy or president [Lyndon] Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House on Monday and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam.'
The question today is whether US President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, National Security Adviser James Jones, and the special envoy on Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, have consulted experts as they plunge US forces ever deeper into a country that has chewed up foreign armies for centuries.
