We must dispense with a dangerous myth. In an effort to pressure the president to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, armchair commanders have dusted off the old canard that "we could have won in Vietnam if only … " Some revisionists contend we could have won "if only" Congress had not balked at the military's insatiable hunger for more troops and more bombing. Others argue that pacification of the countryside and training of Vietnamese soldiers could have carried the day "if only" we had stuck with these policies longer. Still others argue that we could have won "if only" President Johnson had made a much stronger American commitment when he first decided to send combat troops in 1965.Let me be clear: more than 58,000 American troops died because they were sent into battle based on false assumptions, flawed goals, and faulty strategies. Yes, we adopted smarter tactics near the end, but by then the die was cast. History has definitively branded Vietnam for the mistake it was—no one should believe that the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans and at least 1.5 million Vietnamese were somehow not quite enough.So what should we learn from Vietnam? The lessons aren't simple, particularly when applied to a very different country—with a vastly different history, culture, and geography—in a different era. But some comparisons with Afghanistan are apt.We are once again fighting an insurgency in a rural country with a weak central government. Americans were outsiders in a complex war among Vietnamese. Our allies were corrupt. Our adversaries were ruthless. Enemy territory was everywhere. Last month I was traveling down a dirt road in Afghanistan's Helmand province in a heavily armored vehicle. Through thick, bullet-proof windows, I could see Afghans staring as we rumbled past. Their numb looks of confusion took me back 40 years to my days as a young Navy officer in Vietnam. Once again, our enemy blends in with the local population and finds sanctuary in a neighboring country. Once again, the danger of being perceived as an occupying force by a war-weary population remains perilous.With Afghanistan, as with Vietnam, we have a president facing pressure from the military. President Kennedy was strong enough to refuse to be pushed into combat operations. His successor, President Johnson, feared a public dispute with his commanders, so he failed to stand up to them when they insisted that the United States was headed for disaster without an escalation. Combat forces were rushed in with tragic results. More recently, whoever leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal's assessment that we would fail in Afghanistan without additional forces was trying to pressure President Obama to sign off on a big troop increase before his own deliberations were done. Those inside and outside the military demanding fast action risk subverting the deliberative process and putting us on a road to the mindless escalation that cost tens of thousands of American lives in Vietnam.But the situation in Afghanistan is also very different from the challenge we faced in Southeast Asia. Vietnam was a mistaken proxy war against worldwide communism: nothing there realistically threatened the United States. The other major powers at the time of the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union and China, had no interest in seeing us escape the quagmire. Yet in September 2001, mass murder was plotted against us from Afghan soil. We all know why we invaded Afghanistan, and so do the Russians, the Chinese, and other world powers. There was no contrived Gulf of Tonkin rationale. It was not a mistake.Now we must choose a smart way forward so no one asks whether we've made a mistake in staying. The main lesson that Obama must absorb from Vietnam is the necessity to explain our goals in Afghanistan, and to choose clear and realistic strategies to meet them. In this war, the enemy can be defeated by better government and effective economic assistance. Unlike the relatively popular Viet Cong, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan are widely despised. If we can provide sufficient security and support to our Afghan allies, there's little reason they can't win the battle for hearts and minds. Moreover, Russia and China have economic and security interests in helping us stabilize the situation. Harnessing those interests can help us.However we proceed, we need to recognize that this is an Afghan war for the future of Afghanistan. We entered Vietnam thinking of it as a key part of the larger Cold War struggle. But the Vietnamese made clear this was a war about their country—Vietnam—not about America or the Soviet Union. We need to make a decision about Afghanistan strategy based on the reality of the place, not some imagined sense of what we wish it to be.I pledged to myself long ago to be informed by Vietnam, not imprisoned by it. The easiest way to make a mistake is to tolerate a debate that sells our country short. In the case of Afghanistan, politics has reduced a difficult mission in a complex country to a simple, headline-ready "yes or no" on troop numbers. What we need is a realistic assessment of our strategy, military and civilian combined. One of the architects of the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, confessed decades later that he knew victory was no longer possible well before the American death toll had reached half its eventual total. He offers a horrific lesson that the time to voice concerns is now.

Obama is the president in title only and a commander in chief in title only. He is a very poor excuse for either job! Most Americans are starting to recognize that and are slowing turning against his policies and his EGO, which is his biggest downfall. He thinks he is smarter than our founding fathers! The people who voted him in had no idea of what they were doing and now they will suffer for their ignorance! We send a boy in to do a man's job and it is sad that he doesn't know how to do anythng accept lie about everything. He has hired dozens of czars to do what he can't do through congress. We are under the rule of dictators by proxy and even the senate will do nothing accept talk about them and say how bad they are for the country, but the senate will do nothing to stop them because the president will cut of funds for their districts and other special favors that he might offer if they go along with his agenda!
The president is a Marxist, which permits him to lie at will. He has proven that over and over.

wow, hankster6. your paranoia is apparent, but your credibility is shot. you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, but you certainly do have a strong opinion about it. i suppose you do have a right to your wildly ill-informed perception, but when your opinion is based on nothing more than fear and hatred i have to wonder... get a grip, man, and learn a thing or two about marxism. then look back nine years and try to get some perspective. obama didn't get us into this mess, and he's doing his damnedest to get us out. your bitterness and prejudices won't help anything. and by the way, this article is about afghanistan, not your fear and ignorance of the president.

senator Kerry.
You did much to launch a discrimination campaign enshrined by the DNC and left wing these many years--and lied to do it (discrimination campaigns are waged by lies, deception and half-truth--but you know all that, we see!).
Enjoy the incredible wealth you aquired--like winning the lottery-- keep your mouth shut and stay the F--- out of the way.

South Vietnam was no less an outpost to contain communism than West Germany or South Korea, and certainly, these outposts must be maintained as long as U.S. values and interests are threatened, with or without U.S. troops. They are mandatory and indefinite expenses that must be budgeted into any nation's defense. Nowadays, even without the threat of a communist superpower, U.S. troops are still being deployed in Germany, South Korea, Japan, etc.... Yet, on the brink of victory, the abandonment of South Vietnam by the U.S. was inhumanly orchestrated. Why such a devastating and unconscionable treatment of an ally? When did this thought of disengagement start? The answer lies in the battle of Khe Sanh in 1968. After the Khe Sanh victory, U.S. strategists reveled in the discovery of their logistics superiority, even allied forces (U.S. Marines and ARVN paratroopers) were outnumbered by the Viet Cong who tried in vain to repeat Dien Bien Phu. The Khe Sanh battle destroyed the invincible myth of the Soviet bloc and Chinese war machine where its logistics showed the first signs of distress but Khe Sanh was never reinforced to become a strategic chokepoint against this war machine's logistics and infiltration along the ho chi minh trail. Instead, Khe Sanh was hastily abandoned and its victory was immediately downplayed into oblivion until 41 years later. Back home in the USSR, famine and long lines in front of collective food stores were rampant. Advancing its war machine into a couple more countries, Angola, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, overreached USSR imploded. Khe Sanh now stands its place on the honor row with Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandie (Ref. Obama's 2009 inaugural speech) in the history of the U.S. but the Vietnam War was never declared as an astute, calculated tactic to achieve a strategic victory and destruction of the USSR. Let the uninformed parrot it a suffering defeat shuns the guilt of the nation.

John Kerry mentions Vietnam 17 times and Iraq zero times when mentioning troop escalation for Afghanistan. I wonder why that might be? Perhaps the successful surge in Iraq doesn't fit into his tired old Vietnam comparisons.

I just love how the RepubliCON's start every post about Obama with "American's are realizing" or "A majority of American's," or even "American's are...." Like their particular little fantasy is embraced by the vast majority. This with about 20% of the voting population identifying themselves as Republican, and not all of them in agreement on any one topic. Truly an amazing spin on reality, or perhaps a colossal delusion of grandeur.

Vietnam could not be won because the effort was undermined by Quislings in the democrat party like John Kerry.

Vietnam could not be won because the people did not wish that it be won, and because our objective was not to completely destroy the country. The people of Afghanistan may or may not want what we not, but probably do not. Our struggle puts them between some semblance of liberty and their traditional cultural faith. Even in this country, Liberty too often loses to religion. Every county, no matter how bad the tyrant, has them for a reason.

Our choice is an impossible one, especially in military terms. The military can be effective in one way only, and that is reducing an enemy to rubble. We could have done that in Vietnam, and risked war with China. This is why it was not done, lest we forget. No one now realistically wants to destroy the Afghans. Unfortunately, that pretty much makes our might armed forces impotent. This is the REAL lesson of Vietnam. Our armed forces can crush any nation of this size easily, but if we insist on any other outcome, we have failed before we begin. Apparently, this is a lesson we never learned in Korea, or Vietnam.

Respectfully,

Stephen Jackson

Wars are won by intimidating the enemy into submission, or destroying them completely. We neither destroyed Germany completely, nor Japan completely, yet they surrendered. In Afghanistan, the enemy must be made to submit by ruthless attack. As long as we pander to the enemy and attempt to be "the nice guy" we will continue to lose wars such as Korea and Vietnam were lost. Senator Kerry was a part of that capitulation in the past and should be ignored when discussing how to win a war.

"donaldrex" seems to have forgotten something important, namely how those Democratic Party 'Quislings" got into office: the American people voted them in. And surprise, surprise, most of those who voted to cut off funding and aid were also present to vote for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. But I digress: Johnson, Nixon, and the Pentagon all failed miserably to "sell" the Vietnam War to the American public; it was Nixon's "silent majority" who ultimately pulled the plug on the war, not the anti-war protesters.

"donaldrex" is entirely within his rights to question the wisdom and morality of voting for Democrats (just as the rest of us are within our rights to question the wisdom and morality of trusting those Big Business Whores, the Republicans). But he is entirely out of line to suggest that the citizens and politicians exist to serve the military, instead of the other way around.

Thank you Senator Kerry for adding your experienced voice to this debate. My God this entire issue of Newsweek brings back so many memories but I find your piece to be so much more honest than the editorial by Meachem or the revisionist history of Evan Thomas and his partner. I went there voluntarily, totally believing in the possibility of success but left a year later, after the Lom Son 719 operation that turned into a rout of ARVN forces, disillusioned and doubting everything my government had ever told me about the nobility of the war. Will never forget the blank stares of the population as they watched you travel through the country. Not wanting us or our war but taking gladly anything of value they could steal from your vehicle. Ho Chi Minh was their Washington and nothing we did could stop the quest for reunification of their nation. Wars launched on lies inevitably fail.

Why were we in Vietnam? Oh yeah, we killed 1.5 million of them over a political philosophy.. Face it, we are in constant wars because the military is obsolete if they are not and the government wants the people to be fearful so they look like heros. It's the oldest strategy in history.. Soldiers believe in America and want to protect your country. Too bad the leaders just squander their lives..

Citing the battle of Lam Son 719 in 1971, at best hardly won by communist forces, and doubting the nobility of the Vietnam War and the truthfulness of his own government reveal the inner thoughts of a defeatist. It's pure cowardice that cringes at the slightest harms of war. Lam Son in 1971 was at the beginning of the Vietnamization of the war. Bob Atkinson's ignorance in logistics is pitiful. With nearly a million of SEATO troops involved, with the naval blockade and air raids by the 7th Fleet, by squadrons of B-52s, the U.S. could hardly convince the North communists to seat down in Paris and sign a perfunctory peace treaty that they immediately thrashed away. Yet with no significant involvment of U.S. troops, the South Vietnamese infantry with inferior weapons (no anti-tank weapons, no 7th Fleet support) was able to defeat overwhelming commnist forces at the battle of An Loc (4/1972) and at the battle of Quang Tri (6/1972). The Vietnamization of the war showed extraordinary signs of success but the tactical abandonment of South Vietnam was already in gear. Remember that Vietnam in the sixties and the seventies was no Japan or Germany. Both sides, the North Vietnam communists and the South Vietnam nationalists could not make a drop of gasoline nor a bullet to wage a war in which the amount of ordnance dropped on their tiny S-shape landscape exceeded the amount in World War II. It's not a war for independence. For the North, it's an expansion mission in Southeast Asia assigned to ho according to the Soviet worldwide agenda. If countries were adjacent to its borders then it rolled its tanks and pointed missiles to conquer those countries. If they were far away, it trained toadies, ho, fidel, kim, honecker, etc...and disguised its expansionism under the cover of social egalitarianism and independence. It takes political savvy and bravery well above anti-war defeatism to understand that independence and communism ideology are oxymorons. Ho was a Kremlin's toady vigorously trimmed in insurgency warfare and communist indoctrination by Kremlin's 3rd International since early 1920s. He frequently appeared in consecutive Cominterns together with Mao, Tito, etc...and was profusely funded by Lenin and Stalin to further the causes of the USSR in Indochina.Today, the 9th of November, 2009, marks the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany. It serves as a stark comparison to the violent "reunification" of Vietnam. Seriously, saying ho is the Washington of Vietnamese has some merit. Mullah Omar could be Afghanistan's Washinton too, only after the U.S. withdrew. When South Vietnam surrendered to the North, the South Vietnamese flipped mug shots of President Nguyen van Thieu to show their Washington and greeted their Washingtonian liberators with a jungle of red colors. The next day, they all disappeared from the streets and became boat people.

Citing the battle of Lam Son 719 in 1971, at best hardly won by communist forces, and doubting the nobility of the Vietnam War and the truthfulness of his own government reveal the inner thoughts of a defeatist. It's pure cowardice that cringes at the slightest harms of war. Lam Son in 1971 was at the beginning of the Vietnamization of the war. Bob Atkinson's ignorance in logistics is pitiful. With nearly a million of SEATO troops involved, with the naval blockade and air raids by the 7th Fleet, by squadrons of B-52s, the U.S. could hardly convince the North communists to seat down in Paris and sign a perfunctory peace treaty that they immediately thrashed away. Yet with no significant involvment of U.S. troops, the South Vietnamese infantry with inferior weapons (no anti-tank weapons, no 7th Fleet support) was able to defeat overwhelming commnist forces at the battle of An Loc (4/1972) and at the battle of Quang Tri (6/1972). The Vietnamization of the war showed extraordinary signs of success but the tactical abandonment of South Vietnam was already in gear. Remember that Vietnam in the sixties and the seventies was no Japan or Germany. Both sides, the North Vietnam communists and the South Vietnam nationalists could not make a drop of gasoline nor a bullet to wage a war in which the amount of ordnance dropped on their tiny S-shape landscape exceeded the amount in World War II. It's not a war for independence. For the North, it's an expansion mission in Southeast Asia assigned to ho according to the Soviet worldwide agenda. If countries were adjacent to its borders then it rolled its tanks and pointed missiles to conquer those countries. If they were far away, it trained toadies, ho, fidel, kim, honecker, etc...and disguised its expansionism under the cover of social egalitarianism and independence. It takes political savvy and bravery well above anti-war defeatism to understand that independence and communism ideology are oxymorons. Ho was a Kremlin's toady vigorously trimmed in insurgency warfare and communist indoctrination by Kremlin's 3rd International since early 1920s. He frequently appeared in consecutive Cominterns together with Mao, Tito, etc...and was profusely funded by Lenin and Stalin to further the causes of the USSR in Indochina.Today, the 9th of November, 2009, marks the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany. It serves as a stark comparison to the violent "reunification" of Vietnam. Seriously, saying ho is the Washington of Vietnamese has some merit. Mullah Omar could be Afghanistan's Washinton too, only after the U.S. withdrew. When South Vietnam surrendered to the North, the South Vietnamese flipped mug shots of President Nguyen van Thieu to show their Washington and greeted their Washingtonian liberators with a jungle of red colors. The next day, they all disappeared from the streets and became boat people.