The following is an extract of a conversation between ABC presenter
Kerry O’Brien and Australian military strategist David Kilcullen, broadcast on
the ABC program Four Corners, on the
evening of Monday 25 March. Like the Campaign for an Iraq War Inquiry,
Kilcullen thinks we should think very carefully before we follow the US into a
new war:
KERRY O'BRIEN: Just listening to
you talk then about Karzai's - the position that Karzai was put in essentially
by Western forces, had just another eerie echo to me of Vietnam - almost an
exact replica of Vietnam despite the fact that so many people in justifying
going into Afghanistan said there was no parallel.
Do you see that parallel today?
DAVID KILCULLEN: Yeah, I
actually testified in front of the US Senate about five years ago and said that
we have to be very careful to ensure that President Karzai doesn't turn into
President Diem. Diem was the first president of independent South Vietnam, who
remained in power the first period of the international intervention in
Vietnam.
And in fact, the Kennedy
administration connived at a coup that lead to his overthrow and assassination,
and a lot of people were, I guess, disappointed to see how much worse it got
after he was no longer in power.
Although there are some strong
similarities with - you know, between all different kinds of counter-insurgency
engagements like this one, one of the big differences here is, in Vietnam there
were about five international partners who played a big role in the conflict.
Here we've got 50 countries engaged, and the United Nations very heavily
engaged, and a lot of other organisations all pulling together to try to make
the environment better than it was in 2001.
One of the big lessons that I
would take from this whole series of events is if there's a possible
alternative to getting into a counter-insurgency fight, you should avoid it. I
mean, the most important lesson of counter-insurgency is - don't do it.
And I think both Vietnam and
Afghanistan, and even more so Iraq, underline that important lesson.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Well of course
the lessons don't seem to have been learned in the past, you can only hope that
they may be learned in the future but I'm not quite sure what the basis is for
that.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Well I don't
think there is a basis for it. In fact, it's quite interesting that you mention
that. If you look at American military history in particular, and you take -
you start the clock running around the Mexican War in 1846, there's a very
consistent pattern in US military history of the US getting into a large or
long counter-insurgency or stabilisation operation about once every 20 to 30
years for that whole period since the middle of the 19th Century - not just
Vietnam but a whole bunch of stuff that happened in the Caribbean, the
Philippines, the frontier.
There's this very consistent
pattern of about once a generation they get into a conflict like Vietnam. Last
year President Obama issued directives to the Defence Department to say 'We're
going to get out of the business of doing large scale counter-insurgency and
stabilisation operations'.
By my count, he's about the seventh president to make that precise statement, and it seems that this pattern of continuous engagement in counter-insurgency, presidential preferences have absolutely no detectable effect on that pattern.
So I think there's something
that's deeply hidden in the way that the United States relates to the rest of
the world that tends to lead Americans and their Western allies into these
kinds of operations on a regular basis.
I don't think it's going to go
away and it would be great if Afghanistan were the basis for people sitting up
and thinking 'Hey, we should think very carefully before we do this again', but
I'm afraid the historical pattern suggests that that's just not the case.
See full transcript on the ABC website here.
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