Rupert Cornwell: Ghosts of Vietnam era haunt US in endgame for Afghanistan

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US troops die in battle for al-Qa'ida base

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"What is more important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims, or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Thus did Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, once dismiss charges that by its support for the Afghan mujahedin in 1979 America had created a terrorist monster.

He must be revising his judgement now. Those "stirred-up Muslims", who just a few weeks ago looked dead and buried in Afghanistan by the mightiest military machine known to history, have hit back with a vengeance.

For all the Pentagon's efforts to present the loss of the lives of at least nine US servicemen in a weekend as a small hiccup on the road to certain victory, the episode has come as a rude awakening to America.

Yes, everyone knew the war against terrorism would be long and complicated, as President George Bush has all along warned. But in the popular imagination, phase one in Afghanistan was done and dusted. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not surprisingly, therefore, the attack on an MH-47 Chinook helicopter late on Sunday evening Washington time, in which at least six soldiers were killed, has been more than merely the single largest loss of American troops to enemy fire since the Afghan campaign began exactly five months ago. Old ghosts have also been awakened, of military disasters past, in Somalia and ­ mention it at one's peril ­ Vietnam. The parallels must not be pushed too far. At the height of the decade-long Vietnam War, in which 58,000 Americans died, more than half a million US troops were in the field; in the entire Afghan theatre today there appear to be a few thousand at most (though such is the secrecy maintained by the Pentagon that nobody can be sure).

While Vietnam helped to destroy the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, this war still commands wide public support ­ indeed, Mr Bush's approval ratings have been higher, and longer-lasting, than those of any post-war president.

Above all, the Vietnam generation is now at the top of the Pentagon and the State Department. It agrees on one thing, if nothing else: come hell or high water, there will never be another Vietnam.

Nor does the disastrous 1993 involvement in Somalia (recreated in the current film Black Hawk Down) offer much of a parallel. Then, too, the US fell foul of warlords as it tried to impose order on a lawless failed state ­ but the stakes were nowhere near as high as in Afghanistan today. That misadventure sprang from a well-meaning exercise in state-building, initiated by this President's father. This time, America will not be put off by a handful of casualties as it seeks to crush the terrorist movement that brought it 11 September.

But disconcerting similarities abound. As in Vietnam, the Americans are fighting on a terrain that favours their foes. There is a porous border (then Cambodia and Laos, now Pakistan), almost impossible to police. As in Vietnam, the US has been relying on local troops of uncertain reliability.

As in Somalia, its commanders have fallen foul of local rivalries beyond their control. And now as then, critics at home are beginning to put their heads above the parapet.

Last week Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, gently raised the matter, warning of an "expansion without clear direction" of the Afghan campaign against terror, and his senior colleagues are telling the Pentagon that it can expect no blank cheques for the massive budget build-up, which the military justifies by the war against terror.

Nothing too blunt, of course: a President with 77 per cent approval ratings is not to be challenged head-on by his opponents. But American military power, seemingly so irresistible a few weeks ago, looks slightly less all-conquering now. "Substantial pockets of resistance remain," Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, declared at yesterday's Pentagon briefing in words that might have been taken from the infamous "Five O'Clock Follies" of the Vietnam War.

The fierceness of the battle in the frigid mountain ranges around Gardez and the quantity of weaponry at the disposal of the enemy reflect faulintelligence, complacency or a lack of preparation ­ or a combination of all three.

Just how did al-Qa'ida fighters regroup, eluding the Pentagon's highly sophisticated surveillance gadgetry? Whichever way, Washington was taken by surprise. Even if this particular pocket is wiped out, there is more important unfinished business.

This was a war against al-Qa'ida and the Taliban ­ yet their respective leaders, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, at the very least are unaccounted for. Probably, they are still at large. The public will not consider the campaign to have been successful until they are brought in, dead or alive.

So what is the "exit strategy", as the top brass likes to say? Or, as Democrats are starting to ask: having got in, how do we get out?

It seemed so simple. The Americans would quickly wrap up the campaign, leaving their allies to keep the peace while the Pentagon swivelled its guns on to fatter targets, such as Iraq. That neat blueprint is now in shreds. But the Bush administration is silent on its plans ­ with good reason. It doesn't know what to do.

The Vietnam experience argues for the quick pull-out. Yet an inescapable moral obligation rests upon Washington not to repeat the deadly error of 1989, when it left Afghanistan to its fate once the immediate problem ­ in that case the Soviet invader ­ had been dealt with. Even before Gardez, the Karzai government in Kabul was finding it increasingly hard to impose its writ.

Washington will at the very least have to extend its protection to an intervention force of at least 20,000 men, which will have to deploy to population centres across Afghanistan if there is to be any chance of creating a solid permanent government by the appointed time of June. The plan is to train an Afghan army of up to 50,000 to do the job one day. That may be an exit strategy. If so, Bosnia, where a large peacekeeping force is still needed six years after the Dayton accords, suggests exit is a long way off.

In a 1998 interview, Mr Brzezinski boasted of how he had provoked Moscow to step in. He told President Carter proudly that America "had the opportunity of giving the Soviet Union its Vietnam war". But he must be having second thoughts now. In Gardez and far beyond, those "stirred-up Muslims" continue to stir up trouble he never dreamt of.