10. Gareth Porter, “Tajik Grip on Afghan Army Signals New Ethnic War,” IPS News, November 28, 2009, http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49461. Cf. James Denselow, “How National Is the Afghan Army?” Guardian, October 2, 2009. In February 2010 the U.S. Marines launched Operation Moshtarak in Marja, at the heart of the Pashtun province of Helmand. As the U.S. press noted, “Moshtarak” means “Together”—not in Pashtun, however, but in Dari.
11. Spencer Tucker, Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 87.
12. Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 3, quoted in Johnson and Mason, “Refighting the Last War,” 5.
13. Thomas H. Johnson, “Ismail Khan, Heart, and Iranian Influence,” Strategic Insights, July 2004, http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/jul/johnsonJul04.asp.
14. Johnson and Mason, “Refighting the Last War,” 7–8.
15. Rory Stewart, “Afghanistan: What Could Work,” New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010, 62.
16. Rory Stewart, “The Irresistible Illusion,” London Review of Books, July 9, 2009, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n13/rory-stewart/the-irresistible-illusion.
17. Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 127–29.
18. The southern provinces were administered directly by a résident supérieur in Vientiane who also supervised—but indirectly—the quasi-independent northern Kingdom of Louangphrabang.
19. Corruption within the USAID program (or boondoggle) in Laos, centered about bribes paid by CIA contractor Willis Bird, produced a congressional investigation. See Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 196; Martin E. Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos, 186–87; U.S. Congress, House, U.S. Aid Operations in Laos, House Report No. 546, 86th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959).
20. Time, March 17, 1961; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 78.
21. Guardian (London), October 14, 1971. Cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 320–21.
22. Cf. Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1979).
23. Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
24. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 300.
25. John Prados, Lost Crusader: the Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 168.
26. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40.
27. Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7.
28. I agree with the following assessment by Thomas H. Johnson: “The characterization of Afghanistan by the 19th Century British diplomat Sir Henry Rawlinson as ‘consist[ing] of a mere collection of tribes, of unequal power and divergent habits, which are held together more or less closely, according to the personal character of the chief who rules them. The feeling of patriotism, as it is known in Europe, cannot exist among Afghans, for there is no common country’ is still true today and suggests critical nuances for any realistic Afghanistan reconstruction and future political agenda” (Thomas H. Johnson, “Ismail Khan, Heart, and Iranian Influence,” Strategic Insights, July 2004, http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/jul/johnsonJul04.asp).
29. Railways approach Afghanistan from the north, east, south, and west. The only two with foothold terminals in Afghanistan itself are those built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
30. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 461, citing interview with Dr. David Musto.
31. David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980, quoted in McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 462.
32. Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16, quoted in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 77.
