Military Advisers: Rehabbing An Image
In May 2014 the United States sent a few military advisers into Nigeria to help look for more than 200 girls kidnapped by terrorist group Boko Haram.
For a generation of Americans, the phrase "military advisers" conjures nightmare scenarios of the US becoming entangled in another country's war with little hope of affecting any kind of change.
I'm talking about Vietnam in the 1960s, of course, where American military involvement started with a few hundred military advisers.
From that quagmire, the words "military advisers" became diplomatically dirty.
Plunge Into War
The story of America in Vietnam started at the close of World War II. The US had partnered with Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh to drive Japan out of Southeast Asia. But at war's end, the US refused to allow Ho to take control of Vietnam. He was communist, and in American eyes he was as bad as Stalin or Mao. Adhering to the policy of containment, the US instead facilitated a return of France to its former imperial holding of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).
But Ho Chi Minh and his brilliant general Vo Nguyen Giap staged an insurrection that drove the French out of the country in 1954. Rather than see all of Vietnam turn Communist, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration brokered the division of Vietnam. The North would be communist, the South democratic under a leader sympathetic to the US and the West.
When the US reneged on a promise to hold nationwide elections to unite Vietnam in 1956, Ho Chi Minh began another campaign against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dien Diem.
Eisenhower authorized the US Army to create a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to help the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). MAAG numbered close to 750 men.
Violence escalated throughout Eisenhower's second term. When John F. Kennedy succeeded him in 1961, Ike told Kennedy that he may have to send more troops to Vietnam to prevent it from going communist.
Kennedy did, but he stayed with advisers. He sent in 400 more, some of them the elite army Green Beret, which Kennedy requested the army create.
But then the bottom fell out of the tub. By the end of 1962, the army had 9,000 advisers in the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). More than 50 advisers died in combat; the advisers were taking over the fight. By the end of 1963, the number of advisers had grown to more than 16,000.
By then, of course, Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson was president. He kept up the adviser charade for a while, but after the Gulf of Tonkin incident and his outright election 1964, Johnson boosted combat troops and plunged the US deep into the Vietnam War.
Rehabilitating The Phrase
The notion of the military advisers is getting something of a rehabilitation under President Barack Obama. When the failed state of Somalia began moving back to an approximation of government in 2013, Obama okayed a couple dozen advisers to reestablish US contact with that country. (The US had written it off since the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu in 1993.)
He has also sent advisers into Uganda to help search for terrorist leader Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army, as well as Nigeria to look for more than 200 girls taken from a girls' school by Boko Haram.
The simple fact that the Ugandan army hasn't caught Kony since US troops arrived in 2011 means that the Americans really are working as advisers. They haven't taken over any fighting, or taken the lead in command. They are offering military advise and technical support that Ugandans can either use or decline, make the best of or botch.
The same will no doubt be true in Nigeria.
Obama wants to lend US support where it might be possible to avert genocide and human rights abuses. But he also knows the lessons of history, in this instance at least; there are certain post-colonial lines the US cannot and should not cross.
And thus the term "military advisers" now means more what it should have 50 years ago.
For a generation of Americans, the phrase "military advisers" conjures nightmare scenarios of the US becoming entangled in another country's war with little hope of affecting any kind of change.
I'm talking about Vietnam in the 1960s, of course, where American military involvement started with a few hundred military advisers.
From that quagmire, the words "military advisers" became diplomatically dirty.
Plunge Into War
The story of America in Vietnam started at the close of World War II. The US had partnered with Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh to drive Japan out of Southeast Asia. But at war's end, the US refused to allow Ho to take control of Vietnam. He was communist, and in American eyes he was as bad as Stalin or Mao. Adhering to the policy of containment, the US instead facilitated a return of France to its former imperial holding of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).
But Ho Chi Minh and his brilliant general Vo Nguyen Giap staged an insurrection that drove the French out of the country in 1954. Rather than see all of Vietnam turn Communist, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration brokered the division of Vietnam. The North would be communist, the South democratic under a leader sympathetic to the US and the West.
When the US reneged on a promise to hold nationwide elections to unite Vietnam in 1956, Ho Chi Minh began another campaign against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dien Diem.
Eisenhower authorized the US Army to create a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to help the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). MAAG numbered close to 750 men.
Violence escalated throughout Eisenhower's second term. When John F. Kennedy succeeded him in 1961, Ike told Kennedy that he may have to send more troops to Vietnam to prevent it from going communist.
Kennedy did, but he stayed with advisers. He sent in 400 more, some of them the elite army Green Beret, which Kennedy requested the army create.
But then the bottom fell out of the tub. By the end of 1962, the army had 9,000 advisers in the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). More than 50 advisers died in combat; the advisers were taking over the fight. By the end of 1963, the number of advisers had grown to more than 16,000.
By then, of course, Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson was president. He kept up the adviser charade for a while, but after the Gulf of Tonkin incident and his outright election 1964, Johnson boosted combat troops and plunged the US deep into the Vietnam War.
Rehabilitating The Phrase
The notion of the military advisers is getting something of a rehabilitation under President Barack Obama. When the failed state of Somalia began moving back to an approximation of government in 2013, Obama okayed a couple dozen advisers to reestablish US contact with that country. (The US had written it off since the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu in 1993.)
He has also sent advisers into Uganda to help search for terrorist leader Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army, as well as Nigeria to look for more than 200 girls taken from a girls' school by Boko Haram.
The simple fact that the Ugandan army hasn't caught Kony since US troops arrived in 2011 means that the Americans really are working as advisers. They haven't taken over any fighting, or taken the lead in command. They are offering military advise and technical support that Ugandans can either use or decline, make the best of or botch.
The same will no doubt be true in Nigeria.
Obama wants to lend US support where it might be possible to avert genocide and human rights abuses. But he also knows the lessons of history, in this instance at least; there are certain post-colonial lines the US cannot and should not cross.
And thus the term "military advisers" now means more what it should have 50 years ago.
Source...