Turn, Turn, Turn: A time for Learn, Learn, Learn Afghan War

Vietghanistan could sink Obama and hurt US. Learn from the mistakes we made in past few years and in Viet Nam. Remember that peace is what Afghans and Americans will support.

clipped from www.cleveland.com Vietnam's lessons for our commanders in Afghanistan Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. (McClatchy-Tribune) In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States (along with NATO in the current war) spent vast sums of money to train an indigenous military that proved to be just as corrupt as its government and wholly ineffective. Enemy soldiers in both places were largely indistinguishable from the local population because they, too, were Vietnamese and now, in most cases, Afghans. And in both wars the United States was fighting highly skilled, ideological zealots for communism and now for Islamic extremism. I am not saying here that Afghanistan will become a 21st-century Vietnam. But I am saying we should hope that Obama will learn from President Lyndon Johnson's mistakes as he considers that troop-increase request soon to land on his desk.