Drone strikes

By Gwynne Dyer

YOU aren’t really the US president until you’ve ordered an air-strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two in his first week in office. Obama must know that these remote-controlled drone strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy”, whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. It also annoys Pakistan, whose territory the United States violates in order to carry out the killings.President Obama may be planning to shut Guantanamo, but the broader concept of a “war on terror” is still alive and well in Washington. Most of the people he has appointed to run his defence and foreign policies believe in it, and there is no sign that he himself questions it.That generation of American officers learned from their miserable experience in Vietnam that going halfway around the world to fight a conventional military campaign against an ideology (communism then, Islamism now) was a truly stupid idea.The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the US military “advisors” whom Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent to South Vietnam in 1956-63. The political job of creating a pro-western, anti-communist state was entrusted to America’s man in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the South Vietnamese army had the job of fighting the communist rebels, the Viet Cong.Unfortunately, neither Diem nor the South Vietnamese army had much success, and by the early 1960s the Viet Cong were clearly on the road to victory. So Kennedy authorised a group of South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem (although he seemed shocked when they killed him). And Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy soon afterwards, authorised a rapid expansion of the American troop commitment in Vietnam. The United States took over the war. And then it lost it.If this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because we are now at a similar juncture in America’s war in Afghanistan. Washington’s man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, and the Afghan army he theoretically commands have failed to quell the insurrection, and are visibly losing ground.So the talk in Washington now is all of replacing Karzai (although it will probably be done via elections, which are easily manipulated in Afghanistan), and the American troop commitment in the country is going up to 60,000.We already know how this story ends. There is not a lot in common between President John F. Kennedy and President George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win and did not need to win.Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the “war on terror” could do for him, too.