Obama '08?

Without any doubt, it doesn't matter which party a politician belongs to, and has been shown, both major party politicians have taken money from the health insurance industry - and related medical assns.

Good evening to you all.
Ican has a thread called something like "Iran, Iraq and the UN." I stop by there but rarely post. Ican has a tendency to repeat himself at length.
But Mysteryman did post this today:
"Afghanistan will be Obama's Vietnam."
What did you mean, Jeff?

interesting, I thought I said that a month ago, anyway I think it's true no matter who said it.

I don't think so. Vietnam was a different matter.

The Bush admin went to great lengths to say that Iraq and Afghan were nothing, absolutely nothing, like Vietnam.
I could never see what the difference was. Then it was young men fighting and dying for an undefined cause. Now it is young men and women fighting and dying...
For what?

yes rjb, I understand your dilemma but I don't agree, for me it's quite simply the fact that afghanistan and vietnam were/are unwinable.

I think, Bob, I said VN was and Afghan is, not win-able.

yeah, knee-jerk on my part, sorry.

just thinking RJB, there are not many of us southeast indo china vets left but there's lots of opinions on what we did wrong by those who know better. I do got to extremes to forget that.

man RJB, I really wish I could express myself better.

I mean that simply Obama will not be able to get out of Afghanistan.
He has already sent about 17,000 more troops there, and there is already talk about sending more.
We are fighting an enemy that knows the terrain, has a large civilian support base, and are masters of guerilla warfare.
We win the battles, but we wont win the war.

If memory serves me correctly, and Dys would know more then I do, we won most of the battles we fought in Vietnam, but we could never score that "knockout blow" that was needed to win.
We seem to be having that same problem in Afghanistan.
President Johnson was trapped into increasing troop strength in Vietnam every time the generals asked, and it seems Obama is caught in the same trap.

That is why I think Afghanistan will be Obama's vietnam.

Notwithstanding whether or not any cause is worth the lives of young men and women, there is a significant difference between the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Incredible as it seems to me, a rather large chunk of the American public seems to have forgotten the fact that 9/11 was, in large measure, made possible by the fact that Al-Qaeda was able to train, plan and prepare in safety, thanks to the protection and support of a national government: Afghanistan's.

Clearly, Vietnam did not present a direct threat to the United States. Proponents of the war considered it a distant battleground in the larger global war with Communist Russia and China. With 20/20 hindsight, opponents of the Vietnam War have dismissed and even mocked the Domino Theory that helped give rise to it, and yet in the early decades of the Cold War, the Domino Theory was pretty well accepted.

Democrats, in particular, seem to forget that both JFK and LBJ considered Vietnam as an important beachhead against the spread of communism, and were full fledged proponents of the Domino Theory.

In fact, the Domino Theory was to some extent "proven" when the US withdrew all of its forces from Vietnam. Simultaneous to the communist takeover of Vietnam was the dominance of the Pathet Lao in Laos and the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia.

At the time, virtually every Southeast Asian nation was confronted with significant communist insurgencies. That Thailand, Indonesia, Burma and the Philippines did not go red was due to the power of local strongmen and the incompetence of the communist insurgencies. It was not from lack of trying by Reds.

Be that as it may, the threat presented to America by a communist takeover of all of Indo-china was several degrees removed. Not a reason for a strategically minded president to refrain from sending US troops to the region, but a clear distinction with the threat of a defeat in Afghanistan.

Who is the enemy in the current Afghani War? Hopefully, even school children can provide the correct answer - The Taliban.

Who gave the cover and support to Al-Qaeda that enabled 9/11?

If you answered The Taliban you get a gold star.

What will happen if the US, once again, abandons Afghanistan to The Taliban?

There is one thing of which we can be certain concerning such an outcome: Afghanistan will, again, become a staging ground for Islamist attacks against the US. Whether or not those attacks are successful will, largely, depend upon the focus of the governing administration (a subject for another thread) but the threat will be quite direct.

Comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan are specious at best.

If the fact that young Americans are dying is the common and most compelling element, then we can compare Afghanistan to WWII, the Civil War and the American Revolution.

Perhaps it was all about the Election that Obama focused on the importance of the war in Afghanistan, but focus he did.

If he pulls out now, he will have some difficult explaining to do.

Afghanistan will be the test of Obama the president.

I give him the benefit of the doubt and believe that, during the campaign, he understood the importance of the Afghani military action.

That importance has not changed now that he resides in the White House.

To "win" in Afghanistan we must commit many more troops. Only knee-jerk anti-war activists and George Will believe otherwise.

So Obama has a significant choice before him:

Make good on his promise to fight the important war in Afghanistan or cut and run as his leftist supporters will urge.

My bet?

He will cut and run, and Iraq and Afghanistan will become either strongholds of Islamist terrorism or lands of chaos and death.

Somewhere in this foul progression will come another successful attack against America.

As each Islamist attack has trumped its predecessors in violence and impact, so too will the next one.

Should a nuke take out an American city, all y'all Liberals will need to take to the hills, and every Muslim in America better find a way out. It will not be pretty and it will not be just, but it will feel righteous.

Those people who have claimed that it is better that we find an American city in smoking ruin than we violate the "rights" of a few foreigners will find themselves hanging from the gibbets.

The world is a far harsher and more dangerous place than the dilettantes would believe.

how does an army conquer mist? one minute it's there, the next it is gone.

part of me says stay and try to get it right. the other part says split and cut our losses. in the end, afghanistan and the additional drain it put on the soviet budget had more than a little to do with the beginning of the end for the ussr. i'm just not sure if this is what we want to define our actions for the time being.

The majority of Americans want our military to leave Afghanistan; and I agree. Our financial problems doesn't justify the expansion of debt when more Americans are losing their security (jobs, homes and health care) at home.

It is an odd day indeed when I find myself almost completely on the side of Finn, except I truly don't think Obama is going to cut and run in Afghanistan regardless of the polls and perhaps the seeminglyfruitlessness of it. But I guess we'll see.

It's unfortunate, but I agree with you that Obama is in Afghanistan for the duration. Losing more lives and billions spent in Afghanistan will be for naught.

Isn't this more like your Wish, John?

Anyone, including you, who wants to drag me off to the gibbets for my beliefs, even if we do get nuked, is more than welcome to try.

I love how you Keyboard Kommandos write stuff that makes you feel tough.

Cycloptichorn

It would be wonderful were Obama to cut and run from Afghanistan. We finally did it in Nam, and the country was all the better for it.

Right.

This country was deeply divided and suffered the lasting effects of defeat - though undeserved.

A generation of Vietnamese were condemned to poverty and tyranny under a regime that, for the next twenty years remained the most oppressive and backward in the region.

I didn't' read past the cut and run part, should have made it clear don't agree with that bunch of BS either.

Unlike Iraq and Vietnam, the reason we went into Afghanistan was and still remains just and it is just as dangerous now as it was when we first went there because they have regrouped while we have been sidetracked in Iraq.

We need to maybe employ better tactics by talking to moderates the way they did before the "surge" in Iraq and use less military means and use more money on improving conditions so that people will not turn to the Taliban and other anti-government groups out of despair and poverty. I know that smacks of nation building and appeasement but I think it would be more successful than dropping bombs and killing people.