1. 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
