![]() ![]() In both cases, 80 percent of the population was and is rural, with national literacy hovering around 10 percent. Both insurgencies were and are rurally based. ![]() The superficial parallels between the Afghanistan and Vietnam conflicts are eerie enough. troops or, in the words of General McChrystal's classified assessment leaked to the Washington Post, face "mission failure." Whatever the outcomes of the President's decision and the current Afghan election in the next few weeks, however, they will not affect the extraordinary similarity of the two conflicts. ![]() troop commitment has escalated steadily, a pattern familiar from he Vietnam War, and now the President must contemplate a request for another 40,000 U.S. The Kabul government is so corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent that even its election rigging is buffoonish. Attacks of all types in Afghanistan have increased each year since 2003 and are up dramatically in 2009, the deadliest year yet for American forces. There is general agreement today, as indeed there was before the Diem Coup in 1963, tha the war is going badly. President Obama certainly knows, as Presidents Johnson and Nixon did in similar circumstances, that the choice of alternatives in between bad and worse. Stanley McChrystal, and an embarrassing election fiasco in Afghanistan. In October, as this article is being written, the Obama Administration is engaged in a very public strategic review following both a grim assessment from the President's hand picked theatre command, Gen. The Obama Administration deliberately took ownership of the Afghanistan war in its first days in office by sending more troops and ordering multiple strategic reviews. For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing. They should not - the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template. Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed away from it. A number of analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in conjunction with Afghanistan. It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, the United States has refought the last war. ![]()
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