8/9/2019 Why Afghanistan is Not Vietnam, Yet

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Why Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam, YetBy

Gerald Gillis

One can occasionally hear the political pundits speak of the U.S. being pulled everdeeper into an Afghanistan imbroglio in much the same manner as happened in

Vietnam more than four decades ago. It is said (with growing frequency, to be sure)that the only rational way out of this morass is to pull the plug and leaveAfghanistan to the Afghans, where it belongs. Why should the U.S. expect toachieve a military victory in a place where the British Empire and the Soviet Unionleft so much blood and treasure before their inglorious departures? Didnt the U.S.learn in Vietnam that supporting corrupt political regimes and failing to win thehearts-and-minds of the populace were recipes for failure?

While Afghanistan does provide some parallels to Vietnam, they are few, with thedissimilarities being far more dominant. The premise for sending the U.S. militaryinto Vietnam was part of a treaty that promised assistance to Vietnam (and other SEAsia nations) if invaded. It was a strategic counterbalance to the then-prevailing

Domino Theory of Communist conquest nation by nation, region by region.Conversely, the U.S. entry into Afghanistan was done preemptively to destroy thetraining camps and infrastructure of a terrorist organization that had attacked theU.S. mainland on September 11, 2001.

The composition of the U.S. Army included a large proportion of draftees, wheretodays military is an all-volunteer force. The Vietnam War was significantly moredeadly than Afghanistan, and because of the aforementioned draftee composition,the war and its resultant casualties reached deeper into the social layers of theAmerican public in a way the Afghanistan War has not. Consequently, the publicsanti-war fervor over Vietnam was dramatically more pronounced than what weveseen or heard over Afghanistan.

The Vietnam War destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. It remains to beseen what the affects of the Afghanistan War will have on Barack Obamaspresidency, but it seems unlikely that his administration will be crushed under thewars weight. Obama has neither the day-to-day obsession with the war, nor thedetailed level of involvement, as did Johnson. Whether Obama is fully committed tovictory also remains to be seen.

Many Vietnam observers felt that the U.S. was on the verge of winning in the earlySeventies after changing its strategy. Instead, America snatched defeat out of the

jaws of victory when Congress closed off any additional support and essentially setin motion a very bad ending. Will the same thing happen in Afghanistan?

And what will happen then?

Gerald Gillis is the author of the award-winning novel Shall Never See So Much. VisitGeralds website at http://www.geraldgillis.com

8/9/2019 Why Afghanistan is Not Vietnam, Yet

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