U.S. looks to Vietnam experience for Afghanistan tips

U.S. looks to Vietnam experience for Afghanistan tips
By Slobodan Lekic, The Associated Press
Stars and Stripes online edition, Friday, August 7, 2009

BRUSSELS (AP) — Top U.S. officials have reached out to a leading Vietnam war scholar to discuss the similarities of that conflict 40 years ago with American involvement in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is seeking ways to isolate an elusive guerrilla force and win over a skeptical local population.

The overture to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stanley Karnow, who opposes the Afghan war, comes as the U.S. is evaluating its strategy there.

President Barack Obama has doubled the size of the U.S. force to curb a burgeoning Taliban insurgency and bolster the Afghan government. He has tasked Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander, to conduct a strategic review of the fight against Taliban guerrillas and draft a detailed proposal for victory.

McChrystal and Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to the country, telephoned Karnow on July 27 in an apparent effort to apply the lessons of Vietnam to the Afghan war, which started in 2001 when U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Among the concerns voiced by historians is the credibility of President Hamid Karzai's government, which is widely perceived as being plagued by graft and corruption. They draw a parallel between Afghanistan's presidential election on Aug. 20 and the failed effort in Vietnam to legitimize a military regime lacking broad popular support through an imposed presidential election in 1967.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64063



uhc comment: Here's uhc's Vietnam tips:

1. Occupations are notoriously difficult to win.
2. Don't kill everybody in sight and expect them to like you.
3. Don't let this Afghanistan mess go on for 14 years before you declare victory and come home.
4. Take care of your vets - they need your help.

accept lessons learned by the Russians. Inevitably they will argue that our technology is better, we are the good guys and can win over the hearts and minds of the population, and that our reason for being there is to advance the welfare of the Afghani people. All of these are reasons put forth for our presence in Vietnam, and all are incorrect. Telling the American people that Afghanistan is where empires go to die will simply energize the 'we're number one' folks; drawing the parallels between this war and Vietnam makes a more immediate connection to the fact that we can't win in Afghanistan.

We can do the same in Iraq and Afghanistan if we keep on killing innocent people. I know some of you may not like this but Petraeus is an expert in counterinsurgency. You have to win over the population by helping them, not by killing them.

Do people honestly think Afghanis forget about their dead?

couldn't win in Afghanistan, it's no secret that it is a losing proposition!

That should tell them what they need to know.

Don