Richard Whalen

As Yogi Berra would say, it’s deja vu all over again.

The U.S. military’s Central Command wants to send a force of about 100 American “trainers” into Pakistan’s insurgent tribal areas in the Northwest Frontier Territory, according to the New York Times. They would help train the Frontier corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 Pakistanis. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, who lost badly in the recent parliamentary elections, is widely criticized as an American stooge and wants no American troops in his country.

Washington should listen to Musharraf. We are in danger of repeating the fatal mistake Washington made in Vietnam in 1961 when the CIA and the Pentagon overrode local Vietnamese objections and air lifted about 100 American “advisers” to Saigon to take over the counter insurgency that we feared the South Vietnamese were losing. They weren’t losing at all.

The U.S. Ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, a patrician Yankee Republican from Massachusetts who hated the Kennedys, accepted the Administration’s rationale for “victory at any cost,” and began secretly approving military coups and assassinations of South Vietnamese leaders. Soon, with blood on our hands, the U.S. was trapped.

Lyndon Johnson ultimately escalated the stakes by sending 550,000 U.S. troops to South Vietnam. After the U.S. took over the war, the “Americanized” war was hopelessly lost and the U.S. pulled out in 1975.

Today, the Pakistanis have better than a fighting chance to defeat the Jihadists by themselves in the Northwestern Frontier Territory, perhaps with limited U.S. air support and surveillance. President Musharraf’s weakness is not military but political and internal.

He needs to prove that Pakistanis alone can rule their country without any “American” or “European” post-colonialist assistance. Whatever a handful of American “trainers” might be worth, they can do their work discreetly in Islamabad and leave proud Pakistan, nuclear-armed but afraid of its Indian rival, to defend its own borders. Pakistan needs to succeed by itself.