As a student of presidential decision-making, I read with utmost interest Gordon Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster. My curiosity stemmed from the fact that there was a great deal of hoopla that, before making a decision about committing additional troops in Afghanistan, you, along with your advisers, read this book to ensure that right decision was made on that issue. In other words, you were reportedly resolute about avoiding the mistakes of your predecessors before committing the United States in another major conflict of our time.

That book is a fine piece of scholarship, and, indeed, a must read for policymakers. Since you are America’s top policymaker, I was very curious as to what lessons you might have drawn from it. If I could have interviewed you, I would have asked you point blank: What exactly did you learn from that book, and what steps you have taken to avoid making disastrous mistakes? Since I do not have access to you, let me make several observations about what I think your rationale may have been and to think out loud about the aspects of that book to which you may have (or should have) paid attention and the facets you seem to have missed.

I will start from the very last chapter of Goldstein’s book, “Intervention is a Presidential Choice,” since you have already made the war in Afghanistan “your war.” You made that choice very clear even as a presidential candidate, when you depicted the Afghanistan war as the “right” war. However, for some strange reason, your supporters thought that you would not demonstrate the same kind of commitment to another war as President Lyndon Johnson did to Vietnam, or as George W. Bush did to Iraq. It was not your fault, Mr. President; it was the fault of your supporters for holding on to the wrong assumption. Goldstein’s narrative in his last chapter makes it clear how a large group of supporters of a different president (President John Kennedy) still believe that he would have disentangled America from Vietnam. No one will ever know whether that was a correct assumption, but the fact is that supporters always give their icons the benefit of the doubt. They look for parallels—as Kennedy’s supporters did by drawing parallels about how quickly he abandoned a failed mission in the case of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, thereby concluding that he would have done just that in the case of Vietnam after his reelection—and hold on to a belief that their hero would not have faltered.

It seems, Mr. President, that while you were so anxious to read history and to look for similarities and differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan, you might have been swept away more by the differences between the two than the similarities, and made the decision to commit 30,000 additional troops, thereby putting a personal stamp on the war in Afghanistan.

In the days of President Johnson, the domino theory was too sacrosanct to be dismissed. The human and economic costs related to that decision was agonizing for him. However, in the final analysis he swallowed the bitter pill and committed America to a cause that ultimately led to its failure. In your tenure, al-Qaida is too evil not to be confronted, never mind the price. You are similarly agonized before committing additional troops. But I wonder whether you really pondered long and hard about the last sentence of Goldstein’s book: “…intervention is a presidential choice, not an inevitability.” Observing you from a distance, you appeared to have treated the option of America’s additional troop commitment in Afghanistan as an inevitability right after your election. After that decision, the unseen hand of history was already busy writing the narrative for the rest of your administration.

McGeorge Bundy, who served as Special Assistant on national security to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and who is the chief subject of Goldstein’s book, also faced the issue of drawing parallels of his own era. The author writes, “Bundy’s core conviction about Vietnam in 1964 left him only one path to follow. Inclined to accept the Cold War parallels to the Korean War, unwilling to question the primacy of the domino theory, and repelled by the premise of withdrawal or diplomatic extrication through neutralization, the only option left was military escalation (p. 140).” What seems to have burdened you is the two parallels of the Vietnam era. First, you insisted that all of your advisors thoroughly discuss with you all assumptions related to additional commitment of troops in Afghanistan. You did not want any of your major advisors to nurture even private doubts regarding that option. Secondly, you became highly sensitive about having an exit strategy. Your predecessor, George W. Bush, did not have one when he decided to invade Iraq. Only the Iraqi insurgency imposed one on him, especially in the aftermath of the Iraq Study Groups’ recommendation that the U.S. should cut its losses and leave Iraq.

You tried to be proactive on that subject and, in a highly unusual fashion, you imposed an exit strategy on yourself. You are working under the historical burden of avoiding another defeat (a la Vietnam). You might also be placating your critics by signaling them that you do not intend to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. Everyone inside the U.S. knows how artificial that deadline really is.

At the same time, I wonder whether you have paid ample attention to another powerful parallel that is working against America’s involvement in Afghanistan. When Soviet troops ignominiously pulled out of that country in 1989, the United States also left Afghanistan. As you were debating and holding endless meetings before announcing your decision to commit additional troops to Afghanistan, the Afghan people and the Taliban-al-Qaida nexus were becoming fully apprised of the fact that America would leave Afghanistan once again. From the point of the Afghan populace, the declaration that America intends to leave within a year or so is bad news. Why should they stick their necks out for the U.S., a country with a notorious tradition of using its friends and then leaving them to become prey to forces of destruction and mayhem long after America’s exit? The insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan, on the contrary, could not be happier knowing that they only have to wait out the lone superpower.

One of the legacies of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam is that the military leaders started emphasizing the necessity for having an exit strategy before sending our troops to the next battlefield. But exit strategy also creates an artificial sense of urgency that the enemy forces do not share. In fact, the knowledge that the clock starts to tick for the redeployment of American forces soon after they are deployed tends to work against us and for the enemy forces. I am only reminded of the famous observation that is generally related to Mullah Omar, when he reported to have stated, “You have the watches, but we have the time.” So, while you are poised to win in Afghanistan, America’s adversaries in that country are watching the ticking clock that is bringing its hour of withdrawal closer by the minute. For them, that hour will bring anything but the triumphant calls of victory on the U.S. side.

One more troubling parallel is the controversy related to America’s support of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. In both instances, the United States faced unpopular presidents, thereby making its own presence in those countries highly unpopular. Consider the following passage: “There is a distressing absence of positive commitment to any serious social or political purpose. Outside observers are ready to write the patient off. All of this tends to bring latent anti-Americanism dangerously near to the surface (p. 157).” This passage, even though written by McGeorge Bundy in the 1960s, is entirely applicable to Afghanistan today.

There were reports that Richard Holbrooke’s favored former American official on the U.N. team in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, as a demonstration of his revulsion about the corrupt nature of the government of Hamid Karzai, recommended his ouster. But, quite wisely, you rejected that recommendation, which was blatantly unconstitutional. Still, the fact remains that your administration is backing a highly corrupt head of state. In that capacity, Karzai is likely to subscribe, no matter how unwittingly, to America’s potential failure in Afghanistan. The absence of governmental legitimacy was a major problem in South Vietnam. That problem continues to haunt the Karzai government in view of the sham elections of August 2009.

Two more chapters of Goldstein’s book that struck me were “Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It right,” and “Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends.” The massive national security bureaucracy of the United States is legendary about making mistakes of colossus proportion. Kennedy was so badly burned by the CIA’s wrong-headed plot that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco that he never again trusted it during another major crisis of his short-lived presidency, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, as well as his brief handling of the Vietnam conflict. The CIA could not predict the implosion of the Soviet Union. And one can never forget that agency’s discreditable role in promoting “Bush’s war” in Iraq. You also knew only too well the role of the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in creating the Iraqi quagmire.

Since you added more troops in Afghanistan, I wondered whether you had one of the aforementioned lessons of Goldstein’s book in mind, “never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends.” Johnson did not have indeterminate ends in mind. His ultimate objective was to win in Vietnam. But he was faced with the most inordinate task of establishing a government in South Vietnam that could govern well and sustain itself, while the North Vietnamese did everything to stop the emergence of such a government. As an ultimate alternative, he used the awesome power of the American military to keep North Vietnam from winning, but failed. What crippled Johnson was the absence of an indefinite commitment to stay put and to absorb human losses in South Vietnam. George W. Bush almost encountered the same fate in Iraq for the same reason, if not for the timely confluence of the Iraqi Sahwa movement and America’s counterinsurgency strategy, which deescalated violence and saved a devastating defeat for America.

Your challenge is even more awesome than that of your aforementioned predecessors for three reasons. First, your objectives in Afghanistan appear as indeterminate as those of Johnson’s. If that is not true, then perhaps you have not amply clarified it. To say that U.S. troops will leave when Afghanistan becomes a stable country is very similar to what LBJ emphasized regarding the government of South Vietnam. Second, the Afghan war remains highly unpopular inside the United States even before you announced your decision to send 30,000 additional troops. Third, most NATO allies do not share your resolve and commitment to continue the fight in Afghanistan.

One more historical parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan, Mr. President, is the resolve of those peoples never to allow foreign occupation of their countries. I know, America’s machinery of public diplomacy continues to emphasize that we are not in Afghanistan as an occupying force. What is important to note, however, is that most Pushtoons (who formulate 42 percent of the population of that country) do not believe that; and they formulate the backbone of support of the Taliban in Afghanistan. So, for a majority of the people there, they are fighting foreign occupation forces led by the United States. I wonder whether you have missed that fact.

As the title of one of the chapters of Goldstein’s book states, “Politics Is the Enemy of Strategy.” And, Mr. President, I am afraid that we might be in the process of watching a mistake of an equally massive proportion in Afghanistan. I say that because nation-building in Afghanistan is not your focus, where just that type of approach might be most pertinent and compelling one.

In Pakistan, your preferred approach is counterterrorism (CT), an important aspect of which is the use of drone attacks. That tactic, to be sure, is killing some members of al-Qaida, but many Pakistani civilians are also dying in the process. The Pew Research Center opinion polls are documenting the massive amount of anti-Americanism stemming from your CT-related tactics. The good news in Pakistan is massive American assistance under the Kerry-Lugar Bill (the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act). That ought to be identified as the single most successful achievement of your presidency thus far.

Mr. President, I am sure you have made the right judgment regarding America’s commitment to Afghanistan. But the criterion of rightness or wrongness of a decision is only determined by the historians much later, when such decisions lead to victory or defeat. I am sure LBJ did not think he was making any “wrong” judgments when he made them. Ultimately, he relied heavily on the use of America’s military power to extract victory out of Ho Chi Minh, but still failed.

By using our military power, we can convert that country (and Pakistan) into parking lots. However, following the current counterinsurgency doctrine, the United States will not do that. On this issue, you have not made a mistake. Your choice is purely a pragmatic one. However, pragmatic choices do not necessarily lead to victory. More importantly, wars are known for “wrong” as well as for “right” decisions, a number of which are made accidentally. So, I hope that an historical accident stemming from an inadvertent mistake in Afghanistan is not waiting to happen that would result in another defeat for the United States.

As a retrospective analysis of America’s involvement in the Vietnam quagmire, Lessons in Disaster informs current and future decision-makers what went wrong during the Vietnam imbroglio. However, it does not advise what specific decision of America’s contemporary involvement in Afghanistan is a sure way of winning or avoiding a defeat. Regarding this point, Mr. President, I am sure you have spent a lot of time reflecting. But like LBJ, you cannot be sure of anything until history tells the tale.

No one can doubt that Kennedy felt he was right in committing the American troops to fight the communists in Vietnam.  One only has to recall the famous lines of his inaugural address of paying any price and facing any foes in fighting for freedom.

By the same token, Obama has frequently described the war in Afghanistan as a war of necessity.  He might not have realized that that is how many presidents and prime ministers got embroiled in wars.  However, the most ignored aspect of such decisions is that it is relatively easy to paint oneself in rhetorical corners of one’s own making.  That was Obama did during the presidential campaign when he regularly chided President George W. Bush for starting the war in Iraq, but stated that the United States should be waging a war in Afghanistan and against al-Qaida and the Taliban. 

Obama is facing a challenge that Kennedy did not encounter, because he did not live to face the consequences of failure.  That challenge is related to the question of what if he failed in Afghanistan.

While there are no silver bullets for winning in Afghanistan, the counterinsurgency strategy that was used in Iraq is considered by the American military leaders as something that comes close to being regarded as ensuring the victory.

Obama is encountering another very hot issue: As President, he must decide whether to insert more troops into Afghanistan as General Stanley McCrystal wants, or deny him forces and condemn himself (Obama) to failure.  If he sends more troops to Afghanistan and faces failure, then future historians would be highly disparaging of him for not standing up to his military adviser, something that Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill famously did and, thus, became archetypes of what “great leaders” should do. 

If he inserts more troops into Afghanistan and postpones defeat, then the judgment on his leadership will be convoluted and contentious.  In this context, we hear that President Obama and his advisers are reading Gordon Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster, which deals with Kennedy’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy’s role in the Vietnam War.

However, the trouble with books of history is that they will tell you everything about the past successes and failures.  However, they invariably leave the reader—in this instance, President Obama—to decide for himself what decision he should make regarding a crisis at hand.  Another important reality is that no two historical events or crises are exactly the same, no matter how similar those events appear to be.

Obama is doing everything he can before making up his mind about accepting or not accepting General McCrystal’s recommendation for more troops.  He is well-advised in not attaching much importance to where the top military brass stands on this issue.  They have no superior insight on this issue.  They were wrong during the Vietnam conflict, and the odds are high that they might be wrong in the Afghan conflict.  Obama is reportedly reading books on Vietnam, discussing what went right and wrong in the United States’ latest embroilment in Iraq, is having open discussions with his aids. 

However, in the final analysis, he must remember two advices that come from two different sources.  The first one comes from Collin Powell when he was the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He did not want to commit the American troops in any conflicts for which there was no support from the American public.  More to the point, he advised future presidents for the necessity of having an “exit strategy” before committing the U.S. forces. 

The second source of advice for President Obama is what McGeorge Bundy told Goldstein:  “Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right” [and] “Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends.”  That second half of the preceding statement is precisely what Powell has stated in his insistence on having an “exit strategy.”