Quagmire in the brain

Prof. Michael "Bilge" Byers has produced a truly ignorant piece of "analysis". Just a few excerpts from a piece in the Ottawa Citizen, with my responses:

Canada's quagmire
The steady stream of maimed or killed soldiers is but one of many increasingly disturbing parallels between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War
...
Both conflicts were preceded by a long history of failed foreign occupations. The Japanese and French had been forced out of Vietnam; Alexander the Great, the British Empire and Soviet Union were all expelled from Afghanistan...

The Japanese weren't "forced out of Vietnam" by anything the Allies or the Vietnamese did in the country. The Japanese Empire surrendered after the dropping of nuclear weapons by the US and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. That is what ended their occupation of Vietnam.

Alexander the Great was not "expelled" from what is now Afghanistan. He conquered it though some resistance continued. The key point is that his Greek successors ruled in much of that area for another 200 years.

The Iranians conquered the country in 550 A.D. After that the country was generally ruled by Iranians or various Turkic invaders, e.g. Tamerlane. The Mongol Genghis Khan also conquered Afghanistan. An independent Afghan state only really emerged in 1747, led by Ahmad Shah Durrani.

In both instances, charismatic military leaders assumed prominent roles. In 1965, Gen. William Westmoreland was named Time's Man of the Year. Described by the magazine as the "sinewy personification of the American fighting man," he "directed the historic buildup, drew up the battle plans, and infused the ... men under him with his own idealistic view of U.S. aims and responsibilities."

In February 2008, just as MPs were considering whether to extend the Kandahar mission, Gen. Rick Hillier publicly asked: "Is it too much to ask that our Parliament ... show their support for the men and women who will execute the mission by voting overwhelmingly to support them in the danger and risks they will encounter?"..

US Gen. William Westmoreland was no Rick Hillier. Gen. Westmoreland was about as charismatic as Dalton McGuinty.

The effort to build up Afghan government forces is reminiscent of the Nixon Doctrine, whereby a strengthened Vietnamese army was supposed to take over from U.S. soldiers. This policy of "Vietnamization" failed spectacularly when the Viet Cong swept into Saigon...

The Viet Cong never "swept into Saigon" after "Vietnamization" of the war. Those indigenous south Vietnamese guerrillas were effectively defeated during the 1968 Tet offensive. Thereafter most fighting in the south was done by regular soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. And in 1975, after American combat forces had been withdrawn from South Vietnam, it was the North Vietnamese Army--equipped with tanks and heavy artillery--that captured Saigon in a lightning conventional warfare offensive.

Two letters in reply the Citizen printed:

Many successes

Canadians seek to avoid civilian casualties

By the way:

Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For?

As a Canadian I am embarrassed that he has a chair at a major university in our country.

Update: Maybe even "search and destroy" works sometimes:

Paratroopers launch biggest battle in Afghanistan for two years

In one of the biggest air assaults in their history, troops from the Parachute Regiment have spent the last four days deep in Taliban territory.

Breaking one of the last insurgent strongholds in southern Afghanistan, the "Battle of Qarat-e-Hazrat" in Zabul Province ended in an enemy rout.

The Daily Telegraph's Defence Correspondent Thomas Harding watched as British firepower finally turned the tide in the Taliban's own "back yard".

Witnessing the firefight, he reports on a fight which destroyed the idea of Afghanistan's "mythical warriors"...