Vietnam to Afghanistan

There is a perennial danger in imagining that one war will replicate the history of another. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sent troops to Iraq and foresaw that they would be greeted as liberators, in a happy reenactment of American soldiers entering Paris beneath fluttering rose petals; six years and more than 4,300 American fatalities later, their promises have been bitterly repudiated and America still struggles to extricate itself from that reckless act of adventurism.

If conservatives like to fight World War II over and over, liberals see the repetitions of Vietnam -- they worry that wars fought far from American shores will confront nationalist sentiment, turn Americans into hated invaders and end in morass and humiliation.

That view was readily apparent last week as President Obama announced his plans to escalate America's commitment to Afghanistan, and the left wing of his party flinched at the thought of Vietnam's history repeating itself in that notoriously ungovernable country. Commentators warned of quagmire, dredging up the Vietnam-era pejorative. They noted that, as in Vietnam, the United States is supporting a shaky regime in Afghanistan -- in this case the corruption-riddled administration of President Hamid Karzai, whose reelection was marred by evidence of fraud. After Obama's speech on Wednesday, at least one analyst, Boston University international relations professor Andrew Bacevich, compared Obama's escalation of the war to Richard Nixon's handling of Vietnam after his 1968 election.

Those are valid concerns, and indeed, there is more than a whiff of "Vietnamization" in Obama's plan to put Afghan security forces on their feet so that American troops can come home. Nor can any thoughtful observer deny the possibility that the United States may become bogged down in hard fighting without a clear end, or that it may turn out to be far harder to get out of Afghanistan than supporters had hoped or anticipated.

But if it does, it won't just be because Afghanistan is a replay of Vietnam; it will also be because Afghanistan has its own set of perils. The Vietnam analogy works only up to a point. There are similarities between the wars, of course, but there are as many differences as there are areas of overlap, and learning from history -- as distinct from exploiting it -- requires drawing careful conclusions, not merely those that reinforce an argument.