Goldstein:, Eerie how Obama is tracking Kennedy's Path

[steven johnson]

The parallels between John Kennedy and Barack Obama have been explored by Gordon Goldstein. Hamid Karzai is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. Vietnam, like Afghanistan, could not be secured over the centuries by China, France, Japan or the United States and Afghanistan has been a notorious graveyard for the political fortunes of of Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviets.

Now the US is recycling the failed “clear and hold” strategy that didn't work in Vietnam for Afghanistan. Instead of the hawks and doves of Vietnam, we have the all-in or all-out dichotomy which was a fixture of the Iraq debate and is a false a choice logical fallacy. We found a path toward stability in Iraq by the 'Sunni awakening', secret assasinations and paying surrogates to maintain stability in different areas. This was not the blunt force of predator drone attacks and sweeps to kill the maximal number of 'militants'.

Hopefully, we can get beyond the George W. Bush 'Rumsfeld Doctrine' and into a more nuanced, pragmatic foreign policy. And have some intelligence injected into the discussions like those of John F. Kennedy.

George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

The remarkable parallels to 2009 became clear last week, when the Obama administration’s internal conflicts about Afghanistan spilled onto the front page. On Monday The Washington Post published Bob Woodward’s account of a confidential assessment by the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, warning that there could be “mission failure” if more troops aren’t added in the next 12 months. In Wednesday’s Times White House officials implicitly pushed back against the leak of McChrystal’s report by saying that the president is “exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan.”

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”

Obama at the Precipice