Birthers

"Afghanistan will continue until the American public grows tired of it."

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Slobodan Lekic
August 7, 2009 - Associated Press

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BRUSSELS — Top U.S. officials have reached out to a leading Vietnam war scholar to discuss the similarities of that conflict 40 years ago with American involvement in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is seeking ways to isolate an elusive guerrilla force and win over a skeptical local population.

The overture to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stanley Karnow, who opposes the Afghan war, comes as the U.S. is evaluating its strategy there.

President Barack Obama has doubled the size of the U.S. force to curb a burgeoning Taliban insurgency and bolster the Afghan government. He has tasked Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander, to conduct a strategic review of the fight against Taliban guerrillas and draft a detailed proposal for victory.

McChrystal and Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to the country, telephoned Karnow on July 27 in an apparent effort to apply the lessons of Vietnam to the Afghan war, which started in 2001 when U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Among the concerns voiced by historians is the credibility of President Hamid Karzai's government, which is widely perceived as being plagued by graft and corruption. They draw a parallel between Afghanistan's presidential election on Aug. 20 and the failed effort in Vietnam to legitimize a military regime lacking broad popular support through an imposed presidential election in 1967.

"Holbrooke rang me from Kabul and passed the phone to the general," said Karnow, who authored the seminal 1983 book, "Vietnam: A History."

Holbrooke confirmed to The Associated Press that the three men discussed similarities between the two wars. "We discussed the two situations and what to do," he said during a visit last week to NATO headquarters in Brussels.

In an interview Thursday with the AP, Karnow said it was the first time he had ever been consulted by U.S. commanders to discuss the war. He did not elaborate on the specifics of the conversation.

When asked what could be drawn from the Vietnam experience, Karnow replied: "What did we learn from Vietnam? We learned that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else seem to want to be in Afghanistan, but not I."

"It now seems unthinkable that the U.S. could lose (in Afghanistan), but that's what experts ... thought in Vietnam in 1967," he said at his Maryland home. "It could be that there will be no real conclusion and that it will go on for a long time until the American public grows tired of it."

An administration official said academics and outside experts have been consulted frequently during the Obama presidency, especially around high-profile events or decisions. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more freely about the administration's behind-the-scenes thinking.

Holbrooke and Karnow have known each other since they were both in Vietnam in the early 1960s. At the time, Holbrooke was a junior U.S. diplomat and Karnow a Time-Life correspondent.

Holbrooke briefly commented on contrasts between the two conflicts, noting that the military regime in Saigon was corrupt and unpopular, while the international community seeks to build a democracy in Afghanistan.

The Vietnam war also was a much bigger conflict. Nearly 550,000 U.S. troops were deployed at the height of the war, whereas 102,000 international troops are currently in Afghanistan — of which 63,000 are American.

James McAllister, a professor of political science at Williams College in Massachusetts who has written extensively about Vietnam, said the administration could learn a lot from Vietnam.

"American policy makers clearly see parallels between the two wars," he said. "They know that the mistakes we made in Vietnam must be avoided in Afghanistan."

McAllister cited analogies between the two wars:

_ In both wars, security forces had an overwhelming advantage in firepower over lightly armed but highly mobile guerrillas.

_ Insurgents in both cases were able to use safe havens in neighboring countries to regroup and re-equip.

_He pointed to McChrystal's order to limit airstrikes and prevent civilian casualties, linking it to the overuse of air power in Vietnam which resulted in massive civilian deaths.

McAllister drew a parallel to another failed political strategy from Vietnam — the presidential election.

"That ('67 ballot) helped ensure that U.S. efforts would continue to be compromised by its support for a corrupt, unpopular regime in Saigon," McAllister said.

Rufus Phillips, Holbrooke's boss in Vietnam and author of the book "Why Vietnam Matters," echoed that warning.

"The rigged election in South Vietnam proved (to be) the most destructive and destabilizing factor of all," said Phillips, now in Kabul helping to monitor the upcoming election.

David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency specialist who will soon assume a role as a senior adviser to McChrystal, compared Karzai to South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

"He has a reasonably clean personal reputation but he's seen as ineffective; his family are corrupt; he's alienated a very substantial portion of the population," Kilcullen said Thursday at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

"He seems paranoid and delusional and out of touch with reality," he said. "That's all the sort of things that were said about President Diem in 1963."

US Air Force Sets Up New Command for Nuclear Forces

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August 7, 2009 - Agence France Presse

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The US Air Force on Friday launches a new Global Strike Command responsible for nuclear forces after two major mishaps raised doubts about the supervision of the country's atomic weapons.

US Air Force strategic bombers sit on the tarmac at a base in Louisiana. The US Air Force on Friday launches a new Global Strike Command responsible for nuclear forces after two major mishaps raised doubts about the supervision of the country's atomic weapons.

The opening of the command marks a shake-up that followed the botched handling of nuclear weapons and the subsequent sacking of the air force's top civilian and military leaders last year.

The command, located at Barksdale Air Force base in the southern state of Louisiana, will combine nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 bombers as well as the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force -- which had previously been under the Air Force Space Command in Colorado.

"We needed to refocus on the nuclear mission and not lose sight of that," Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley told reporters ahead of Friday's ceremony.

He said there had been some "painful lessons" but the new command would "reinvigorate our nuclear enterprise."

An outside panel headed by former defense secretary James Schlesinger concluded that the US Air Force had for years given the nuclear forces a lower priority and failed to manage the mission with rigor.

The panel found "an unambiguous, dramatic and unacceptable decline in the air force's commitment to perform the nuclear mission and, until very recently, little has been done to reverse it."

Two widely-publicized incidents raised questions over the air force's handling of its nuclear mission.

First came the inadvertent transfer from one US base to another of nuclear-armed cruise missiles under the wing of a B-52 bomber in September 2007.

Then the Pentagon discovered that nuclear weapons components had been inadvertently shipped to Taiwan in 2006.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates soon fired the air force's top civilian and military leaders in June 2008.

The ICBMs in the 20th Air Force, part of Air Force Space Command, are due to shift to the new command in early December and bombers from the 8th Air Force are scheduled to move to the command in February, officials said.

Three-star General Frank Klotz will lead the new command, which comprises 23,000 airmen.

While the nuclear role would take the top priority, the command would also be ready to employ conventional weapons, including a giant "bunker buster" bomb due to be ready next year, said air force chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz.

The general said the new command included an elaborate inspections regime with regular outside oversight.

"We have made a special effort to make the inspections more demanding, more invasive, more challenging," Schwartz told reporters.

"My judgment was that perhaps the inspections had not been as rigorous as we needed in the past. So we adjusted that," the general said.

He also said setting up a command would ensure the nuclear forces received equal status with other missions in the air force and would help develop a cadre of airmen with relevant skills.

The nuclear forces previously were perceived as a secondary mission, especially after the end of the Cold War.

"The key thing here is we ended up focusing on other things and understandably perhaps, but we are now wiser," Schwartz said.

Arms control talks with Russia and a major nuclear strategy review underway at the Pentagon had highlighted the importance of the nuclear forces, Donley said.

Donley and Schwartz discussed the command at a briefing Wednesday at the Pentagon. But the air force barred the release of their remarks until Friday as officers wanted to avoid the announcement coinciding with Thursday's anniversary of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.

The attack killed some 140,000 people, either instantly or in the days and weeks that followed.