Oh, good grief:
According to retired Army Colonel Doug Macgregor, history provides a guide to what he expects to happen in Afghanistan. He expects the withdrawal Afghanistan to resemble the withdrawal from Vietnam.
Then the author says:
This scenario does not bode well for the future of Afghanistan. Within two years of the American withdrawal, communist North Vietnam took control of the south.
What is not clear is whether the second statement is the author's conclusion or what Macgregor thinks.
Macgregor really speaks of American troops standing down in Afghanistan to avoid combat casualties in order to avoid angering the civilian voters back home, just as we did in the waning days of our presence in Vietnam.
Macgregor clearly thinks we should get out, as his wish for a January 1, 2014 total withdrawal date indicates. But Macgregor is not quoted as saying the outcome will be like Vietnam.
And Afghanistan simply isn't Vietnam even though liberals have revoked the titles of "the good war" and the "necessary war" after the Iraq War was won.
One, there is no draft and no popular opposition to either the war or the troops fighting the war.
Nor is our army broken because of the awful withdrawal policy that broke unit cohesion in the early 1970s.
Most importantly, for the purpose of addressing the prediction of another Vietnam, who gets to play the role of the North Vietnamese Army in this little Vietnam flashback drama?
Because that is what was required for South Vietnam to have had the outcome that the Vietnam War had, as the article notes.
A mechanized North Vietnamese Army (NVA) with ample support in equipment and training from China and Russia was able to overrun a South Vietnamese military cut off from American supplies and stuck in a dangerous strategic trap of having to defend a long frontier from the DMZ down to the Gulf of Thailand with a largely strategically immobile army that needed heavy air support to defeat any North Vietnamese massed effort to pierce Saigon's defenses. We not only did not provide the air power to support the ARVN, as promised; but our Congress refused to even supply the shadow of our air force that South Vietnam had. Or supply their army, too.
So if Afghanistan is to have a Vietnam outcome, pray tell, where is the notional NVA?
I'm so tired of these attempts at appearing to be a deep thinker by comparing Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever to the war in Vietnam when the vast majority of people have no clue about what happened in South Vietnam let alone the more recent fight they want to claim is doomed.
Predictions of doom in Afghanistan seem to have more to do with excusing a refusal to defend our gains than with any rational analysis of what could happen.
