• Print
• E-Mail
• Feedback

07/20/2010

II. Iraq was never Vietnam, and Afghanistan will never be. The problem with the overly hasty comparisons voiced by critics is that they gloss over the historic facts. At the height of the Vietnam War, there were 543,000 US soldiers on the ground, or well over twice as many as are now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. More than 58,000 US soldiers had died in Vietnam by the time the war ended in 1975. Up to 1,000 GIs were dying every week in 1968, and the overall conflict claimed the lives of at least 3 million Vietnamese and well over half a million Cambodians and Laotians. Anyone familiar with these numbers will likely avoid making Vietnam comparisons today.

Nevertheless, there are similarities in the ways the respective American presidents have handled their armed conflicts politically. Like his predecessors Johnson and Richard Nixon, Obama promised that America's wars would soon come to an end. And, like Johnson and Nixon, Obama said that his goal was to return control of the countries now occupied by US troops to their governments as soon as possible.

Obama promised to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, and to start bringing home the troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. Nothing of the sort will happen. It will take until November for all of the 30,000 additional soldiers currently being deployed to Afghanistan, which will bring the US contingent in the country to more than 100,000 troops, to have actually arrived in the country. If Obama made good on his promise to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, these new troops would have only about nine months to turn things around in the Hindu Kush region. Judging by the current situation there, this would be a hopeless undertaking.

Winning the Battles, Losing the War

The dire state of the war effort in Afghanistan has been particularly evident in recent weeks. In Marjah, a small city in southern Afghanistan, thousands of British and American soldiers achieved a hard-fought and costly victory against the Taliban, but upon closer inspection, it was not a victory at all. Today, after the NATO forces' major offensive, Marjah is neither liberated nor pacified. NATO forces are in fact not in control of the city, because the enemy, broken up into pieces, is gradually returning to take over. The efforts of the US-led troops seem almost desperate, and they are emblematic of what has been happening in Afghanistan for almost nine years.

The Americans and their allies are winning all the battles, and they are losing the war. This week, the global public is now being prepared for a major, supposedly decisive offensive against Kandahar, the home of the Afghan Taliban. The corresponding rhetoric is reminiscent of the situation reports submitted by the failing generals in Vietnam. And it doesn't take an oracle to predict that a hailstorm of bad news will soon be coming from Kandahar, proving, once again, that this war -- whether it's called a battle against terrorism, counterinsurgency or a peacekeeping operation -- cannot be won.

The majority of the Afghan people, complete with their corrupt, incompetent government in Kabul, no longer seem to have an interest in the success of the Americans and their allies. In fact, today it seems that the Afghans would like nothing more than to see all of the foreigners disappear from their soil and go back to where they came from, even if it comes at the cost of a new Taliban government.

• Back
• 1
• | 2
• | 3
• | 4
• | 5
• | 6
• Next

• Part 1: The Risk of Failure in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Part 2: How the President Deals with Armed Conflicts
• Part 3: The Prospect of Civil War Is Never Far Away
• Part 4: A Consistently Dismal Outlook for Afghanistan
• Part 5: In Afghanistan, Options Are Extreme and Contradictory
• Part 6: An Endgame Around the Role of the US in the World