(HOST) Former NBC correspondent Robert Hager reported on the war in Vietnam, and he remembers conditions that he says are too close to the current situation in Afghanistan… for comfort.
(HAGER) President Obama is nearing a decision on whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Speculation is that he’ll send some – but not as many as General McChrystal has requested.
I’m wondering if new troops can help.
I keep thinking of Vietnam – which was my first assignment as a network news correspondent. I went out a "hawk" – in favor of the war. President Kennedy told us communism had to be stopped.
But the good thing about journalism is you see things firsthand.
Within months, I became a "dove."
It seemed to me we were obvious outsiders there. We didn’t look like Vietnamese. We didn’t talk like Vietnamese. We were propping up a government that many saw as corrupt and unmotivated. By contrast, the Viet Cong communist guerrillas – and their North Vietnamese allies seemed highly motivated. They’d had a long history of fighting to oust foreign occupiers – first the Japanese, then the French, now the U.S.
Meantime, when I went out the war was costing nearly 300 young American lives a week. And for what? It looked to me as though we were going to lose.
Could more troops have turned this around? Well, President Nixon poured on more firepower when he carpet-bombed Hanoi and sent troops over the borders to Laos and Cambodia to try to wipe out guerrilla sanctuaries. It didn’t work.
It’s was Vermont’s own, beloved Senator George Aiken who was widely quoted as saying the U.S. should simply "declare victory and go home." That’s actually a misquote – what he said was along lines of declaring victory and scaling back. In the end, we declared peace and went home, ending our long ordeal… permitting the country to go communist, as it almost certainly would have in any event.
And do I think there are parallels to Afghanistan? In my opinion… you bet. We don’t look like Afghans… Don’t talk like Afghans. We’re trying to mold a questionable government in the image of a western democracy. But our very presence may help cast the Taliban as nationalists trying to oust the foreigners, and may also be a magnet for drawing-in Al Qaeda hotheads from all across the middle east. And at what expense in American lives and tax-dollars?
And I think there’s one more parallel between the two wars that it seems to me, doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s the number of innocent people who get caught in the cross-fire. As I said earlier, journalists get to see events firsthand, and in Vietnam I saw plenty: orphans on the streets of Saigon – some missing limbs; in the countryside, burned out hamlets with huge craters left by bombs or shells; frightened young mothers with children clinging to them, cowering beside what was left of their grass huts – old men and old women unable to reach their rice paddies they needed for food. And these were the survivors.
War is not pretty. And what Vietnam taught me is that there is simply no way to fight a war without innocents – lots of them – being maimed or killed.
So, if Vermont’s Senator Aiken were still alive, I wonder what he’d say, now, about putting more troops in Afghanistan? My hunch is that he’d say it’s more important to be thinking about a way to one day, get the U.S. out – and our troops back home.