Domino Theory in the Age of Terror
When I was a university student during the Vietnam War we had long debates about the domino theory that if South Vietnam fell then the rest of Indochina and, one by one, the remaining countries of southeast Asia, would go communist in rapid succession.
It was, as some of us who supported it were told loftily, a theory quite unproven and discounted by many experts.
In the event, it seemed largely borne out by what happened in 1975, if not exactly in the neat and tidy way that some predicted: Cambodia and Laos fell as, and plainly because, Saigon fell.
The other southeast Asian countries, which had been given time to strengthen their economies and political institutions by the long holding action in Vietnam, did not fall. The bottle stayed corked, as The Economist put it.
However, emboldened by this wave of victory, communist movements with Soviet help staged takeovers in a series of other, not geographically contiguous, countries, with communist or far-leftist regimes coming to power in Benin, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada and Nicaragua during the 1970s.
The last domino to fall was probably the Smith regime in Rhodesia in 1980: the Marxist takeovers in neighbouring Mozambique and Angola had made its position hopeless.
There was an upsurge of revolutionary communist and leftist movements in western Europe and the US at about the same time - including groups such as the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the Weather Underground.
A few years later, and perhaps partly in reaction, we saw the dominoes falling again, but this time they went the other way. Possibly the costly Soviet failure in Afghanistan was the first signal that the Red Army, which we had been told would be able to sweep NATO forces into the Atlantic in a few days in the event of a general attack westward into Europe, could not even subdue a poor, backward nation with which it shared a border.
This was among the events giving heart to the anti-communist movements smouldering within the whole Soviet empire.
Anyway, Hungary and Poland were the first countries in Europe to show that they could now openly defy Moscow and get away with it, with rapid consequences in the rest of eastern Europe, the Baltic states and Russia itself.
Soon the last domino crashed in Moscow. Even in China and Indochina communist ideology survived in little more than name. It had not been a matter of military invasion but of demonstration.
History never repeats itself exactly, but the domino effect appears to have been sufficiently demonstrated in recent decades to look very pertinent to Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond.
It seems obvious that a Western defeat in Afghanistan would make a Taliban victory in Pakistan very likely. If defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan is proving difficult, defeating an achieved and dug-in Taliban regime in Pakistan would be worse for both military and political reasons.
Even if the Taliban did not get hold of Pakistan's considerable stockpile of nuclear weapons, it appears more than probable that such a victory would be disastrous for the western position not only vis-a-vis the geographically contiguous countries but also in regard to other Muslim countries now striving to contain jihadist fundamentalism, such as Turkey and Indonesia, and also in regard to the European and other Western countries that now have large Muslim populations: it seems impossible to deny the logic that extremist and jihadist elements would be encouraged everywhere.
There are already about two million Muslims in Britain alone and recent surveys show a large percentage of them, especially among the younger generation, hold radical and militant attitudes.
In some other European countries the proportion of Muslims in the population is higher.
A Western military defeat in Afghanistan and the consequences in neighbouring countries would almost inevitably have further ongoing consequences in Europe.
Given that the domino theory is worth taking seriously, the magnitude of the possible consequences of defeat in Afghanistan, not only for that country's own people but also for the region and for the west as a whole puts Australia's commitment of an additional 450 troops there into perspective.
