America's Next Unwinnable War

Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy's closest adviser, says Afghanistan isn't threatening to become another Vietnam. It already is.

from The DailyBeast

America’s unwise, unwarranted, and sadly unwinnable war in Afghanistan—hastily initiated and then abandoned for Iraq by President Barack Obama’s ideologically blinded predecessor and dumped into Obama’s lap in the worst possible way—is beginning increasingly to smell like the 1964-68 war in South Vietnam that swallowed up the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

It all sounds familiar. A powerless leader (whether Vietnam’s Diem or Afghanistan’s Karzai) with a corrupt family and little support in the countryside, who refuses to undertake the reforms (land, tax, electoral, and administrative) that the U.S. president tries to press upon him, therefore endangering the regime’s stability against the guerrilla extremists (once communists, now Taliban). Repeatedly changing U.S. commanders and initiating open-ended increases in U.S. forces, without a clearly definable goal, does not help. A military strategy of “clear and hold” usually lasts about a day.

Too many of Obama’s advisers, ignoring Kennedy’s lesson, apparently think the answer in Afghanistan is sending more U.S. combat troops. The real question is not the number of American troops in Afghanistan but their mission — to win more deadly battles with the Afghan people, or to win their goodwill?

(More here.)