Robert S. McNamara's Ghosts in Afghanistan

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Robert S. McNamara's Ghosts in Afghanistan

Robert S. McNamara's Ghosts in Afghanistan
by Tom Hayden

Robert McNamara Attempts to get into Heaven
(c) Jack Ohman

Tom Hayden, one of America's most well-known ant-Vietnam war radicals, is the author of "Ending the War in Iraq" and the forthcoming "The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama."

LOS ANGELES -- Robert McNamara died the other day, as seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

It wasn't the deaths on the same day that made me remember McNamara's folly. It was the sense that McNamara's ghost is hovering over the new graveyard of America's future.

McNamara's team, most products of the United States' elite universities, was dubbed "the best and the brightest" by the disillusioned war correspondent David Halberstam. They were deluded by their arrogance into believing computer-driven measures of success, like body counts.

Though liberal and secular in temperament, they held a faith-based belief in victory. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died, along with countless Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, because of these best and brightest. Not one of them went to jail. McNamara went to the World Bank.

Today another Ivy League president has placed his faith in generals and an inbred crowd of 300 national security advisers drawn from the same elite circles. They are the new best and brightest, and I believe history will show they are marching to folly in their "Long War."

Gen. David Petraeus is the product of an elite university. So is his surrogate spokesman in Washington, John Nagl, at the think tank of the best and brightest, the Center for a New American Security.

So is Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Special Operations spook presiding over Afghanistan and Pakistan. So are Petraeus' Harvard collaborators on the new Marine and Army counterinsurgency manual. So is their top counterinsurgency guru, David Kilcullen who writes of reviving the Vietnam Phoenix program of detention and targeted killings, not only in Afghanistan, but globally.

(For dummies, Phoenix involved the detention, torture and killing of 25,000 alleged Vietcong civilians, and the rounding up millions of peasants into "strategic hamlets" to protect them from any Vietcong still in the jungle. The debacle was terminated in 1971, but Kilcullen keeps hope alive, saying the program was misunderstood. McNamara would have loved Kilcullen, a Ph.D who openly believes in "armed social science.")

I first heard of Robert McNamara as an undergraduate editor at the University of Michigan, when a dean of humanities told me that McNamara, a UM graduate and president of Ford Motors, was an exceptionally bright man with whom dialogue about war and peace was finally possible.

I was skeptical, however, of McNamara's application of scientific management techniques to corporate, government and military policy. I couldn't understand the mystique of intelligence, detached as it was from an understanding of a world in unpredictable transition.

From the perspective of McNamara's funeral, we can take a reckoning.

The Vietnam War was the greatest American folly of the 20th century. Applied to large universities, the same scientific management approaches provoked the Free Speech Movement. And of course, Ford is in ruins.

The brightest were clueless and, in songwriter Barbara Williams' verse, "When the very good have stopped their quest/The very worst are called the best."

For what earthly purpose did those seven Americans die in southern Afghanistan? Are there al-Qaida there? Not by anyone's account. Apparently the Taliban of southern Afghanistan are part of a host organization that will welcome the return of al-Qaida, who, we are warned, will use their new caves to plot strikes against our homeland.

You can have the IQ of a plant to smell this stupidity.

The Pentagon predicts an 18-month war for southern Afghanistan before it can clear, build, hold and hand over the rubble to an Afghan army inferior to the Taliban.

The logical move now for the Taliban would be to draw the young Americans into a bloody quagmire in Kandahar and Helmand, then turn up elsewhere using hit-and-run attacks as they did this week against the gates of NATO or isolated American bases elsewhere.

In an example of further idiocy masked as intelligence, a Pentagon spokesman said the seven deaths were "what we expected." And Nagl of the CNAS told the press that the Taliban and "other insurgents" had engaged in "less direct combat than was expected by the military,"

The Taliban and these "other insurgents" used roadside bombs instead of throwing themselves in front of the American guns. This was a surprise. That's what happens when you go into "Indian country," said a Pentagon official.

In more dangerous Pakistan, meanwhile, the best and brightest are high-fiving themselves after pressuring the wary Pakistan army into invading the Swat Valley and preparing to assault South Waziristan.

This operation has created more casualties than any time since Pakistan was founded and, according to the New York Times, American aid workers are being barred from refugee camps where pro-Taliban forces distribute food and medicine paid for by American taxpayers. In a recent incident obscured by the fog of war, the Taliban last week apparently attacked a site connected with Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

In Iraq, meanwhile, the Pentagon and mainstream media are upset by the very Shia coalition put in power by the American military bragging about the U.S. withdrawal and holding a national day of celebration. Only the brightest are blind to the American effort to disguise failure in Iraq with a decent interval, as orchestrated by Henry Kissinger in Vietnam.

None of this makes any Americans safer. If anything, more civilians will grow to hate us in both countries; some of those civilians will join the Taliban or al-Qaida, the Europeans will soon be abandoning the NATO military mission, Russia will be enjoying payback for what the Americans did to them in Afghanistan, and President Obama will be trapped like Gulliver in a Long War he cannot afford, can never win and dare not lose.

The best and brightest, by their own definition, are incapable of being wrong. McNamara couldn't admit his mistake for decades and still remained at loss for words in the painful final moments of the film "Fog of War." The new best and brightest are like McNamara in this respect as well.

It took an anti-war movement to provoke Daniel Ellsberg, one of the original best and brightest, to finally break ranks and tell the truth. Another movement and another Ellsberg are needed now, before the mistake becomes a permanent one.

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