Will Afghanistan be Obama’s Vietnam?

You have to wonder, don't you? Gwynne Dyer certainly does:

You aren’t really the U.S. president until you’ve ordered an air strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two in his first week in office. But now that he has been blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he’s planning to fight in Afghanistan?

Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy”, whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. It also annoys Pakistan, whose territory the United States violated in order to carry out the killings.

It’s not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn’t). The question is do these killings actually serve any useful purpose. And the same question applies to the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan.

For those who would say, "But Obama didn't get America into Afghanistan", it's worth remembering that Lyndon Johnson, who gets the lion's share of the blame for Vietnam, didn't get America into that mess either:

The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the U.S. military “advisers” whom presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sent to South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963.

Funny how a lot of people forget Kennedy's role in that tragedy, but that's another issue. What matters is what it might mean:

We already know how this story ends. There was not a lot in common between presidents Kennedy and George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win and did not need to win. They then bequeathed those wars to presidents who had ambitious reform agendas in domestic politics and little interest or experience in foreign affairs.

That bequest destroyed Johnson, who took the rotten advice of the military and civilian advisers he inherited from Kennedy because there wasn’t much else on offer in Washington at the time. Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the “war on terror” could do that for him, too.

Yes, LBJ actually did have pretty progressive domestic policies, at least by American standards. Most of the civil rights advances happened under his watch (even though Kennedy often gets the credit because there's footage of him talking to Martin Luther King or something like that).

As for us, the message we as Canadians should take from this is that we need to elect a government here that will get us the fuck out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. We've done enough of the Americans' dirty work already.