Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam

[rangerrebew]

Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam
.
By Frederick W. Kagan
December 20, 2019

Afghanistan isn’t Vietnam. It isn’t even Iraq. George W. Bush did not lie America into this war. He, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and their generals and diplomats didn’t conceal the challenges and failures the U.S. was facing. The “revelations” in The Washington Post are only new to people who have forgotten front page news from a few years ago. The documents The Post obtained just aren’t the Pentagon Papers, however much some would like them to be.

The U.S. entered the war in Afghanistan following the most devastating terrorist attack in history, prepared and launched from that country. Support was overwhelmingly bipartisan; the AUMF passed the House in 2001 420–1. Public support for the war in October 2001 was 88 percent.

None of that support was based on a lie, questionable intelligence, or some modern Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was based on video of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center and the knowledge, never questioned then or since, that al Qaeda conducted the attack from a safe haven in Afghanistan.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2019/12/20/afghanistan_is_not_vietnam_114942.html

[EdinVA]

Have to disagree.

Our federal agencies were to busy do cocktail parties to do their job.The State department knew years before hand that passports were being forged and sold by the bucket and never took steps to secure our border which allowed the 911 hijackers to succeed.We knew about bin laden for decades but never took any actions to isolate him or declaw his abilities.
So, our Gulf of Tonkin was 911 and then we went in to Afghanistan for revenge and to deliberately destabilize a country of 25 million people with no intent or plan to clean up our mess.
Then we refused to fight to win and so begins the slow drip of American blood and treasure with no goal or end in sight.