Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 52

destruction, once so fearsome, became almost quaint
by 1990, and many recalled the Cold War as a bipolar
contest involving only the United States and the former
Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or
USSR). But if Americans at the time chose to view the
Cold War in those simplest of terms, then they were
fooling themselves, just as we fool ourselves today by
remembering it as such. The five decades that saw the
perpetual clouds of World War III looming on the
horizon were trying, complicated times, both politically
and militarily. Robert Golan-Viella was correct when
he noted that “the world itself between 1945 and 1991
wasn’t really that simple,” and yet “Americans often
imposed a simplistic framework on it.”13
The combination of nuclear proliferation; fascist
and totalitarian regimes throughout South America
and Eastern Europe; genocide in central Africa; wars
in Korea, the Middle East, and between India and
Pakistan; and a myriad of civil wars and insurrections
ensured that much of the world was, as historian Paul
Kennedy noted, both exceedingly unsettled and “unfree.” Just because the United States was preoccupied
with the Soviet Union did not mean that the rest of the
world was not very much on fire. “Those were really
scary times,” Kennedy argued in 2007, “and much more
dangerous than our present circumstance.”14
Vietnam. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
brought a renewed interest in the Vietnam War and
have served as a potent reminder of the military,
political, and cultural complexities surrounding that
Southeast Asian conflict. As Stanley Karnow described, the war’s “origins were complex, its lessons
disputed,” and we still struggle to grasp its true legacy.15
The reasons for American failure in Vietnam were
legion: misunderstanding the enemy, strategic and operational constraints, a micromanaging commander in
chief, confused generals, and loss of public support being among the most popular. The result was a wounded
and demoralized U.S. Army that, in the words of Gen.
Bruce Palmer, found itself “brooding over its frustrations and reevaluating its role in the world” a full
decade after the fall of Saigon.16 Sound familiar?
With a robust Soviet military to confront, and the
United States struggling through a cultural and economic funk, the post-Vietnam Era was steeped in uncertainty and filled with doubt. Those who argue that
today’s United States somehow faces a more uncertain,
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daunting future might need to seriously consider what
the world looked like from the American prospective in
the late 1970s.
The Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Fortunately
for the United States and NATO, the USSR launched
its ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. At the
time, the alarming move threatened to serve as the
long-feared trigger to World War III, but its only real
impact was to significantly deplete the Soviet military
over the course of ten years and contribute in large
part to the collapse of the USSR.
While the United States was rebuilding its own
military and engaging in a series of smaller conflicts in
Grenada and Panama, the Soviets were learning the
hard, timeless lesson that combating an insurgency in
the mountains of Afghanistan was exceedingly difficult,
even for a superpower. One Russian veteran suggested, “The practice of massing a large number of regular
forces against a small group of irregular forces to fight a
guerrilla war on rugged terrain is bankrupt” and years
after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan a Russian
military professor concluded:17
It was an impetuous decision to send Soviet forces into this land … the Afghans, whose history
includes many centuries of warfare with various warring groups, could not see these armed
strangers as anything but armed invaders.18
Of course, after nearly fourteen years of operations in
Afghanistan, such observations should sound prophetic
to Americans today and raise legitimate questions. Was
the Soviet military experience in Afghanistan remarkably different than the American experience during
Operation Enduring Freedom? Were the challenges
facing the Soviets truly different? Did the Mujahideen
employ tactics or strategy in the 1980s that varied drastically from the Taliban and other insurgent groups in
recent years? Were the political and cultural dynamics at
play inherently different? To say yes to those questions is
to rely heavily on relatively small details.
A more feasible answer might note the differences
in the Soviet and American military organization and
doctrine, but would admit that the challenges they faced
in Afghanistan—and the difficulty of those challenges—
were more similar than they were different. This point
is important for two reasons. First, it reminds us to look
outside the American experience when making sweeping
judgments about global military affairs and the operating
March-April 2016  MILITARY REVIEW