Why Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam, Yet

By
Gerald Gillis

One can occasionally hear the political pundits speak of the U.S. being pulled ever
deeper 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 leave
Afghanistan to the Afghans, where it belongs. Why should the U.S. expect to
achieve a military victory in a place where the British Empire and the Soviet Union
left so much blood and treasure before their inglorious departures? Didn’t the U.S.
learn in Vietnam that supporting corrupt political regimes and failing to win the
hearts-and-minds of the populace were recipes for failure?

While Afghanistan does provide some parallels to Vietnam, they are few, with the
dissimilarities being far more dominant. The premise for sending the U.S. military
into Vietnam was part of a treaty that promised assistance to Vietnam (and other SE
Asia 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 the
training camps and infrastructure of a terrorist organization that had attacked the
U.S. mainland on September 11, 2001.

The composition of the U.S. Army included a large proportion of draftees, where
today’s military is an all-volunteer force. The Vietnam War was significantly more
deadly than Afghanistan, and because of the aforementioned draftee composition,
the war and its resultant casualties reached deeper into the social layers of the
American public in a way the Afghanistan War has not. Consequently, the public’s
anti-war fervor over Vietnam was dramatically more pronounced than what we’ve
seen or heard over Afghanistan.

The Vietnam War destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. It remains to be

seen what the affects of the Afghanistan War will have on Barack Obama’s
presidency, but it seems unlikely that his administration will be crushed under the
war’s weight. Obama has neither the day-to-day obsession with the war, nor the
detailed level of involvement, as did Johnson. Whether Obama is fully committed to
victory also remains to be seen.

Many Vietnam observers felt that the U.S. was on the verge of winning in the early
Seventies after changing its strategy. Instead, America snatched defeat out of the
jaws of victory when Congress closed off any additional support and essentially set
in 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. Visit
Gerald’s website at http://www.geraldgillis.com