The real counterinsurgency era

It's easy to lose track of why John F. Kennedy was a beloved president. Often caricatured for his skirt-chasing, or derided for failures like the Bay of Pigs, the current generation often overlooks his accomplishments, or takes them for granted. However, it's worth looking at Kennedy's personal crusade to make counterinsurgency a national priority to see what could have happened after the 9/11 attacks, but didn't.

Let me say, in advance, that this big topic can't really be covered adequately in a blog posting. I'm going to allude to important events during Kennedy's tenure; to really understand them, you should read about them in more depth. At the end, I'll give a few book recommendations.

The Kennedy strategy
Kennedy took office with the firm belief that the USSR and the PRC were exploiting what Khrushchev termed "wars of national liberation" for their own benefit. While scholars have been debating ever since how well the Soviets and Chinese could manipulate these movements in their favor, it was a threat that Kennedy  decided to address. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism may have been Cold War priorities, but they were also humanitarian ones. As he said in one line of his inaugural address that resonated powerfully with the American public:

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Since the political and economic defects of other societies led to the kinds of violence that threatened American interests and challenged American ideals, the changes Kennedy set into motion were not purely military, though there was an important military dimension:

• The push for revised military doctrines aimed directly at defeating guerrilla movements.
• The expansion of American special operations forces, seen as important players in counterinsurgency campaigns.
• The creation of economic and technical aid organizations, such as the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, and the Alliance for Progress, designed to address the societal problems that generated political violence.
• Overt and covert participation in wars against Communist forces, such as the secret war in Laos.

Failures and successes
Kennedy's broad campaign met with, at best, mixed success. The US military resisted the doctrinal reforms, and the special operations forces remained marginalized. (It wasn't until the late 1980s that they received the kind of support Kennedy had envisioned, and only because an impatient Congress forced the Pentagon to make important reforms to the SOF command structure and budget.) Some counterinsurgency campaigns, such as Laos, were failures. Military and intelligence aid often went to authoritarian governments who jailed, tortured, and murdered their political opponents (not just Communists).

However, there were successes. While the impact of foreign aid is hard to measure, it expanded good will. As a result, the United States could become an energetic participant in many internal and regional struggles without sacrificing its reputation. A generation of US military officers understood what Kennedy thought should happen, felt the resistance of the services to these changes, and experienced first-hand the disastrous results. While the US lost the Vietnam War, the Vietnam-era military and intelligence professionals were ready to do better a generation later, if needed and given the chance.

One of the Kennedy-era accomplishments accidentally helped counterterrorism, but it was an important step forward nonetheless. The Kennedy Administration's decision to turn the FBI's efforts against organized crime gave it vital experience identifying, infiltrating, and dismantling secretive, disciplined, and violent organizations. Had the FBI remained focused on suspected American Communists, it would not have the skills needed to combat terrorism domestically as it does today.

The Bush presidency
How does Bush compare against Kennedy? There is no unifying vision, with its doctrinal and organizational corollaries, that compares to Kennedy's "twilight struggle." While Kennedy may have lost temporarily some political capital because of the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, he quickly recovered and maintained it through other actions. Unlike Bush, alliances were not strained, and the perception of the United States in the world did not steadily decline. While the Vietnam War was, ultimately, a grand failure, at the very least the United States was actually fighting the right enemy. Among the manifold failures in the Iraq war, the overarching, cataclysmic mistake was that, when the US invaded in 2003, there was no connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba'athists. In the 1960s, the wiretapping of Americans, as execrable as it was, occurred at nothing like the scale that exists today, and certainly not with the intiation and encouragement of the President. Organizations that Kennedy created, such as AID and the Peace Corps, continue working effectively through today. In contrast, Bush's one organizational reform, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, is an embarrassment, botched in execution, and not even Bush's idea in the first place. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between the counterinsurgency era of the 1960s and the counterterrorism era today is the lack of a Presidential legacy. Kennedy inspired a generation, from Peace Corps workers to US Special Forces captains. Bush will leave behind no great organizational or doctrinal reforms, and not even any inspiring rhetoric to compare to the Kennedy inaugural speech. Compared to Kennedy's mixed legacy, during much more time in office, Bush has achieved much less.

Recommended reading
Here are a few books on various topics discussed in this post:

• Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era
• Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam
• Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America

Comments

[FDChief]

Interesting thesis, but my take would be that Kennedy - or, more accurately, the anticommunist hardliners Kennedy had to use at State and DoD - hijacked the SF, originally envisioned as counter-communist guerillas to use as trainers and UW fighters for a bunch of pretty unsavory regimes who spun gold out of the straw of "anticommunism".

Example: the RVN. We look at the atrocities of the PRVN but 20-20 hindsight fails to remember what a really rotten, thoroughly corrupt, hopelessly compromised bunch the elites who we fought for in the South were. As bad as the NVN system was, the SVN government unravelled faster than we could prop it up for the simple reason that it was NOT a Vietnamese government, it was the corpse of French colonialism propped up and rotting from within.

The problem I see is that Kennedy, like his cold-warrior contemporaries, couldn't see past the socalist trappings to distinguish the real Comintern false flags from the genuine locals pissed off at the colonialist trappings foisted on them as their "legitimate" governments. So we helped prop up people like Somoza in Nicaragua, Strossner in Argentina, Marcos in the PI, expending our counterinsurgency money fighting for "our sons-of-bitches", whose corruption, greed and hatred of their people simply put off the "revolution" for another day and made us look like fellow corrupt, oligarchic bastards, rather than trying to side AGAINST the post-colonial oligarchs.

In the 1990s we did the same in Afghanistan, empowering the mullahs and mujihaddin just because they fought the dirty commies. What would have happened if we'd left the Soviets in charge there? We have an example right next door, and I'd say that we'd be a LOT happier today if Afghanistan in 2001 had looked like Kazakhstan or Kyrgistan in 2001.

Bush has achieved less because, relative to the simple Red-vs-Blue political structure of the Kennedy Era, he has less to work with. Kennedy could mobilize the nation against the truly terrifying Soviet threat. Bush has to figure out how to fight a pudding of jihadist groups that aren't really an existential threat. Now, admittedly, he's done about as crappy a job as anyone could, but I'm not sure that Kennedy could have done any better. Let's face it, in the 1960's and 1970's we threw a lot of men and money at facist Greek colonels, corrupt Filipino generals and nasty Central American tyrants, but the reason the Soviet Union fell apart had more to do with the fact that no one wanted to wear Bulgarian sneakers and listen to Polish rock bands than the efforts of our COIN warriors. The real difference between then and now is that the loyal Bushies haven't figured that out. Right now we're all stick, no carrot.

[cheap clothing]

Good point. Thank you for sharing