Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly.  “There were,” he insisted, “no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory.”  Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks “didn’t accomplish much” or were “unsuccessful.”

Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad airbase, and in Paktika and Logar Provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani network, a crime syndicate transformed by the conflict into a leading insurgent group.  Here’s the “lede” that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after reviving counterinsurgency doctrine (only to see it crash-and-burn in short order), the U.S. military still doesn’t get it.

Think of this as a remarkably unblemished record of “failure to understand” stretching from the 1960s to 2012, and undoubtedly beyond.

The Lessons of Tet

When Vietnamese revolutionary forces launched the 1968 Tet Offensive, attacking Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, as well as four other major cities, 35 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 district seats and 50 other hamlets nationwide, they were hoping to spark a general uprising.  What they did instead was spotlight the fact that months of optimistic talk by American officials about tremendous strategic gains and a foreseeable victory had been farcical in the extreme.

Tet made the top U.S. commander, General William Westmoreland, infamous for having claimed just months earlier that an end to America’s war was on the horizon.  As he stood before TV cameras on the battle-scarred grounds of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon — after a small team of Vietcong sappers breached its walls and shot it out with surprised U.S. forces — pronouncing the offensive a failure, he appeared to Americans at home totally out of touch, if not delusional.

Since that moment, it should have been clear that tactical success, even success in any usual sense, is never the be-all or end-all of insurgent warfare.  Guerrillas the world over grasped what had happened in Vietnam.  They took its lessons to heart, and even took them a step further.  They understood, for instance, that you don’t need to lose 58,000 fighters, as the Vietnamese did at Tet, to win important psychological victories.  You need only highlight your enemy’s vulnerabilities, its helplessness to stop you.

The Haqqanis certainly got it, and so just over a week ago sacrificed 57,961 fewer fighters to make a similar point.  Striking a psychological blow while losing only 39 guerrillas, they are distinctly living in the 21st century in global war-making terms.  On the other hand, whether its top civilian and military commanders realize it or not, the Pentagon is still stuck in Saigon, 1968.

Case in point: Secretary of Defense Panetta belittled the Haqqani fighters for not taking “territory.”  It’s a claim that, in its cluelessness, is positively Westmorelandish.

What territory, after all, could a relatively weak and lightly armed force like the Haqqani militants have been out to “regain” by attacking Kabul’s heavily defended diplomatic quarter?  The German Embassy?  And then what would they have done?  À la U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, launch an oil-spot strategy, spreading out slowly from there to secure the American Embassy, the British Embassy and NATO headquarters?  While Panetta at least granted that the attacks were geared toward symbolic effect, he remained strangely focused on their “tactical” significance.

As was the case in Vietnam, the U.S. military in Afghanistan regularly attempts to prove it’s winning via metrics like the number of enemies captured and body counts from “night raids.”  No less frequently, its spokespeople create rules and measures for its enemies in an effort to prove they’re not succeeding. This Westmoreland-ian mindset was evident last week in those statements that the Haqqanis didn’t accomplish much of anything because they didn’t take territory, sweep into Kabul en masse, or carry out a sufficiently “large-scale offensive” — as if the Pentagon were the war’s ringside judge (as well as one of the fighters) and the conflict could be won on points like a boxing match.

In the Vietnam years, Westmoreland and other top U.S. officials were forever seeking an elusive “crossover point” — the moment when their Vietnamese foes would be losing more fighters than they could replace and so (they were convinced) would have to capitulate.  That crossover point was the Pentagon’s El Dorado and to achieve it, the U.S. military fought a war of attrition, just as in recent years the Pentagon has been trying to capture and kill its way to victory in Afghanistan through night raids and conventional offensives.

More than a decade after its own forces swept into Kabul, however, what began as a rag-tag, remnant insurgency has grown stronger and continues to vex the most heavily armed, most technologically advanced, best-funded military on the planet.  All of America’s “tactical gains” and captured territory, especially in the Taliban heartland of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, however, haven’t led to anything close to victory, and one after another its highly publicized light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel offensives, like the much-hyped 2010 Marjah campaign, have faded away and been forgotten.

Afghan and American “Green Zones”

As the Haqqanis meant to underscore with their coordinated attacks, America’s trillion-dollar military and the hundreds of thousands of allied local security forces are still incapable of fully securing a small “green zone” in the heart of the Afghan capital, no less the rest of the country.

The conflict in Afghanistan began with its American commander declaring, “We don’t do body counts,” but a quick glance at recent U.S. military press releases touting supposed “high-value kills” or large numbers of dead insurgents indicates otherwise.  As in Vietnam, the U.S. is once again waging a war of attrition, even as America’s Afghan enemies employ their own very different attrition strategy.  Instead of slugging it out toe-to-toe in large suicidal offensives, they’ve planned a savvy, conservative campaign meant to save fighters and resources while sending an unmistakable message to the Afghan population, and simultaneously exposing the futility of the conflict to the American public.

The attrition of U.S. support for the war is unmistakable.  As late as 2009, according to a poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, 56 percent of Americans believed the Afghan War was still worth fighting.  Just days before the Haqqanis’ coordinated attacks, that number had sunk to 35 percent.  Over the same span, the number of Americans convinced that the war is not worth fighting jumped from 41 percent to 60 percent.  Whatever the Pentagon’s spin, the latest Haqqani offensive is likely to contribute to these trends, and Pentagon press releases about enemy dead are powerless to reverse them.

In the era of an all-voluntary military, of the “warrior corporation“ and its warzone mercenaries, breaching the “green zone” of American public opinion matters less than in the Vietnam era, but it still makes a difference.  The Haqqanis and their Taliban allies may be taking no territory, but in this guerrilla war it turns out that the territory that really matters, on all sides of the battle lines, is the territory inside people’s heads — and there the Pentagon is losing.

On April 12th, the same day that the ABC News/Washington Post poll was released, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Routt flew his last combat mission in Afghanistan.  It was a noteworthy flight.  After all, Routt began his career flying B-52 bombers at the end of the Vietnam War, and was even involved in support efforts for Operation Linebacker II, President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam.

Just a few years after those raids, Nixon was a disgraced ex-president and America’s Vietnamese enemies had won the war.  Decades later, the U.S. stands on the brink of another, more devastating defeat at the hands of far lesser foes, a minority insurgency with weaker allies (and no great power backers).  It’s an enemy that has fought far fewer battles and lost far fewer fighters, despite facing off against a far more sophisticated American war machine.

While Routt is hanging up his bomber jacket and walking away from another American defeat in Asia, the Pentagon continues its efforts to conjure up, if not victory then something other than failure, out of a mélange of money, dead bodies and rosy press releases.  The Haqqanis and their allies, on the other hand, having evidently learned the lessons of the Vietnam War, will undoubtedly continue their carefully controlled war of attrition, while Washington pursues the losing variant it’s been clinging to for years.

The Pentagon might have swapped the Vietnam Syndrome for an Afghan one, but its playbook remains mired in the Vietnam era.  It seems intent on proving that channeling William Westmoreland is the least effective way imaginable to win a war on the Eurasian mainland.

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Infinitely. I have just written a new introduction to my book about the Bosnia war to mark the 20th anniversary of its outbreak in April. One of the points I make there is that the whole landscape changed for war reporters after 9/11. Before then, and Bosnia was an example, if you were wounded as I was, it was just because you were caught in the crossfire. After 9/11, journalists, not just Western journalists but others as well, have been targeted for execution and for ransom. As you saw with the case of Marie Colvin in Homs, the makeshift press center of the rebels was itself targeted because it was challenging accounts of events coming out of [the government in] Damascus. So one of the many points I have been making for years now is that the age of bystander journalism is long gone. You just don’t shine a light on events. Whether you like it or not, you are a player and a participant and sometimes quite an important player. Marie Colvin’s last report the day before she died was so powerful that it was implicitly, even explicitly, a plea for intervention to save the people of Homs. Now that places the journalist in a very vulnerable situation.

When you were a reporter, the public relied on you and a few of your colleagues to report what was happening. Today, with mobile phone footage and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, anyone can report from the front line. Is that a good or bad thing?

It’s positive and negative. It’s positive in that it is very hard for a total close-down of information to occur. Even in Burma, images of resistance were coming out. It’s negative as you are never sure how reliable the information you are being fed is – whether it is authentic, whether indeed it is what it says it is. The Internet is a marvelous tool for information, but equally it is a marvelous tool for disinformation. There will always be a need for believable people of the caliber of Marie Colvin to be on the ground and trusted by their readers and viewers because without that you can’t be sure that you know what’s going on.

To what extent has the culture of celebrity affected war reporting and the type of journalists who are on our screens?

There are still some terrific people out there doing the business. Marie Colvin was not the only one. Bill Neely of ITN is another. But what has happened is that as it has become more dangerous, there has been this tendency to retreat to fortified compounds away from the front line – hotel rooftops, TV station rooftops, building a platform next to a couple of palm trees 20 miles from the action. Then television becomes performing art. Yes, it tends to be done by good-looking, crisply dressed young people. But there are folk still out there who continue to do it in the old-fashioned way – Anthony Loyd at the Times is one of the best. Celebrity journalism is a relatively new phenomenon over the last 20 years. I think it’s fairly deplorable, but we live in a celebrity culture.

But at the same time, as technically overwhelming as this project is, there’s something unsatisfying about it. The first U.S. advisors went into South Vietnam 50 years ago, and the war officially ended in 1975. With two protracted, costly and in some ways Vietnam-like wars finally trudging to a close — wars that happened despite three decades’ worth of anguished books, films and TV series warning us “Never again” — viewers have a right to expect more than a bigger, shinier version of the official narrative: “Once upon a time, a really bad thing happened to us.” “Vietnam in HD” is told almost entirely from the American point of view, avoiding the war’s domestic and international political context save for sporadic mentions of the domino theory and body counts and civic unrest and the like. It gives you the macro view (the timeline of U.S. involvement) and the micro view (first-person witnesses) but offers little in-between. And it’s what a filmmaker does with the in-between that distinguishes a great war movie, or war documentary, from a merely effective one; in-between is the place where texture happens and unique choices are made.

Viewers of a certain age might remember the 1987 HBO documentary “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam,” based on Bernard Edelman’s 1985 book. It was a huge success because it pointedly avoided politics, addressing Vietnam mainly in terms of brotherhood, survival and lost innocence. “Vietnam in HD” takes a somewhat similar approach to its subject, but its narrators all lived to tell their tales. And in place of the 1987 documentary’s muted montages suggesting war experience recollected in tranquility, we get a more immediate, visceral version, with richer greens, muddier browns and bloodier reds, and a soundtrack layered with studio-pristine combat noises. “Vietnam in HD” even dubs the sounds of flashbulbs and rustling papers into presidential press conferences, and adds radio chatter, agonized screams and the clink-clink of spent shell casings to combat scenes. It’s “Dear America” bulked up into a blockbuster. It’s a kind of spiritual sequel to “World War II in HD,” the 2009 series whose tag line was, “The only ones to see the war like this are the ones who lived it.” That tag line was questionable, and this Vietnam follow-up’s tag line — “It’s not the war you know, it’s the war they fought” — is problematic, too. These HD war epics look and sound fantastic, but they are not lifelike. For the most part, their visual language is that of Hollywood war movies — more specifically, war movie trailers — not war documentaries.

Individual sequences — such as the recounting of 1965′s battle of Ia Drang, the first major face-off between American ground troops and the North Vietnamese army — are engrossing, horrible and sad, but in the way that parts of “Platoon” or “Saving Private Ryan” are engrossing, horrible and sad. You get a flurry of quick-cut motion — Americans firing machine guns, dirt flying, men screaming, choppers taking off or landing, jets howling in and torching acres of jungle, all backed by dramatic orchestral music or period-appropriate pop songs, and narrated by whatever real-life witness is serving as our anchor during that part of the story. Sometimes the show’s uber-narrator, Michael C. Hall, yields the stage to an individual celebrity narrator (say, Adrian Grenier from “Entourage” or Blair Underwood from “In Treatment”) who’s there to read a letter or news story or official dispatch that a witness wrote while young; then that narrator’s voice will merge with the voice of the actual subject, who is now in his or her 50s or 60s. It’s all cleverly done, and too busy by half. In a superficial sense, “Vietnam in HD” respects its witnesses and its topic, in that it approaches both with a sober, compassionate attitude. But in another sense, it’s disrespectful, because it treats its testimony and its rare archival and home movie footage as raw material — as data to be manipulated into a fast-cut montage, then remixed and underscored until it feels like a Hollywood war picture.

The most affecting and memorable parts of “Vietnam in HD” fall under two headings: quiet recollections by witnesses (some of whom break down in tears as they remember traumatic moments) and bits of footage that aren’t chopped up for use in a montage but that are instead allowed to linger on-screen, minus nervous cutting or background music or narration to “help” the moment along. These rare moments when “Vietnam in HD” pauses to breathe and reflect are so striking that they made me wish I was seeing a less sprawling and technically ambitious program, one that had more faith in the iconic power of lined faces paired with scratchy fragments of film.

I suspect that we might have gotten a more vivid sense of what it was like to fight in Vietnam from hearing Barry Romo of the 196th infantry describe the sights, sounds and smells of the place, followed by a long chunk of footage showing young men in camouflage gear moving through tall grass or thick jungle, looking around nervously for signs of the enemy, with the same hissy monaural soundtrack that was on that bit of footage originally, before the History Channel’s sound designers went in and “rebuilt” it to Dolby Digital standards.  The historical footage in “Vietnam in HD” is often scratched, faded, warped or burned — a visual touch that signals, “This is the unvarnished truth.”  But what you’re actually getting is a more polished, hyped-up version of the same-old, same-old: Vietnam, the six-hour trailer.