As was the case in the early days of the Kennedy administration, the Obama team has been talking a great deal about expanding military operations to counter the Taliban, while also speaking of important nation-building efforts to bring stability to the Afghani people. What happened in Vietnam, however, was that counterinsurgency wound up dominating the White House’s strategy, leaving little for non-military missions that might have given the South Vietnamese reason for supporting the government that U.S. policymakers were trying to prop up.

 

Solomon cites historian Barbara Tuchman: “All the talk was of ‘winning the allegiance’ of the people to their government, but a government for which allegiance had to be won by outsiders was not a good gamble.” And as with Vietnam, despite the rhetoric by the Obama administration that Washington will commit civic aid to Afghanistan, U.S. spending is overwhelming for the military.

 

The dangers of current leaders blundering into the same mistakes as those from the early 1960s lie within a “psycho-political process” that can blind officials and prevent them from making course corrections in policy. Solomon again cites Tuchman, who wrote, “For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,’ an academic disguise for ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts.’”

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

The March of Folly, Continued (by Norman Solomon, Truthout)