Afghanistan

Today I take keyboard in hand to talk a little bit about all the recent palaver about the war in Afghanistan. Specifically, I heard on NPR the other day some Democratic politician saying that we had no more business being in Afghanistan than we had being in Vietnam. I'm a Democrat and all, but I support the war in Afghanistan and think that comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam are invalid.

VIETNAM: Why you think we got involved in Vietnam depends to an extent on your political philosophy. Was it commercial interests? Were we bailing out the French? Were we truly worried about Communist expansion? Was it all the Domino Theory? Either way, a Communist Vietnam never posed a threat to the United States. Uncle Ho never seemed inclined to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States, and the Domino Theory was in any event proven to be largely false.

AFGHANISTAN: Here we are fighting against a religio-political movement that hosted Osama bin Laden, that continues to host him, that supports social and political "reforms" that anyone in the West must surely find repellent. They probably also provided material aid to al Qaeda when they were planning the attacks on New York, the Pentagon, the Embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and so forth.

It strikes me that we had no compelling reason to become involved in Vietnam. It blew up out of the larger Cold War (my wife would probably refer to it as a "penis-measuring contest") and had no larger ramifications. Indeed, thirty years on, the grip of Communism on Vietnam is failing and one could reasonably argue that though we technically lost the shooting war, we are going to win the larger cultural and social war in the long run.

But Afghanistan? Let's remember who the enemy in Afghanistan is. This isn't some Cold War contretemps being fought out for the sake of doctrinaires; this is a real war against an enemy that struck us first. It seems to me that there are no parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan, except the obvious one that both involve young men dying before their time.

It seemed a pity to me at the time, and an even greater pity now, that we (meaning President Bush and his team) allowed Iraq to distract us from the main mission in Afghanistan. If we had piled those 120,000 troops we sent to Iraq into Afghanistan on top of what we already had there, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

Afghanistan is a mess and no mistake, and I can't say I know exactly what should be done. But I don't think that crying "Vietnam!" and throwing our hands up is the right answer. What would I do? I'd commit the 101st Airborne and a full infantry division of the US Army to the theater and see what happens.