Try hard as you can, there doesn’t seem to be any escaping from comparing America’s eight-year war in Afghanistan to the one it fought in Vietnam.

Every now and then, either when there is a fresh setback or a key moment in Afghanistan’s turbulent history, like last week when it went to the polls to choose a president, the debate flares anew.

Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative piece headlined “Saigon 2009: Afghanistan is today’s Vietnam. No question mark needed.” No matter who wins last week’s election, America is certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan because it is committing the same mistakes it did in Vietnam, authors Thomas H.Johnson and M Chris Mason argue.

The parallels are just too strong, too structural to be ignored. Both Afghanistan and Vietrnam (prior to U.S. engagement there) had surprisingly defeated a European power in a guerrilla war that lasted a decade, followed by a civil war which last another decade. Insurgents in both enjoyed the advantage of a long, trackless and unclosable border and sanctuary beyond it, the authors say.

Both were land wars in Asia with logistics lines more than 9,000 miles long and extremely harsh terrain with few roads, which nullified U.S. advantages in ground mobility and artillery. Almost exactly 80 percent of the population of both countries was rural, and literacy hovered around 10 percent. In both countries, the United States sought to create an indigenous army modeled in its own image, based on U.S. army organization charts.

But above all, the United States has consistently and profoundly misunderstood the nature of the enemy in each circumstance, the authors say. “In Vietnam, the United States insisted on fighting a war against communism, while the enemy was fighting a war of national reunification. In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad.”.  In short, it is hard, almost impossible, to defeat an enemy you don’t understand.

Already, like the Vietnam war, support is starting to dwindle at home with a Washington Post-ABC poll showing the number of Americans who believed the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipping to below 50 percent.

Is Afghanistan already starting to weigh on President Barack Obama, then ? The New York Times this weekend questioned whether he was fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson,  and not another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt as his supporters portrayed him to be even before he took office.

Each presidency is different, but it is “the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program,” the newspaper said.  Obama himself  has expressed concern that Afghanistan may yet hijack his presidency, it reported based on accounts of a group of historians who had dinner with him at the White House this summer.

Like Johnson, Obama has framed Afghanistan as a war of necessity and not choice. Just as Johnson had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism,  America has to be engaged in Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism.  “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban  insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix last week.

But is it really a war of necessity ? Richard Haas, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, argues it was necessary to go into Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, but no longer to remain there. Wars of necessity must meet two tests, he says in an op-ed in the New York Times. They must involve vital national interests, and second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military power to defend those interests.

While it was necessary to invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban,  now that there is a friendly government in Kabul is it necessary to maintain a military presence ? While it is true that the government is weak, and unable to enforce its writ in large parts of the country, it is equally true that terrorism cannot be eliminated even if you had a strong government, Haas argues.

 Militants could still operate from Afghanistan and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best.

Moreover, he says  there are alternatives available.  The United States can begin to curtail  ground combat operations and emphasise drone attacks on militants, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban.

A more radical approach would be withdraw completely and focus on regional and global counter-terrorism efforts and homeland security initiatives to protect the United States from threats that may emanate from Afghanistan, Haas suggests, In that sense, Afghanistan would resemble the approach toward Somalia and other countries where governments are unable or unwilling to take on militants, and the United States eschews military confrontation.

But is the world ready for that ?

[Photographs of Afghan women voting, U.S. troops in Bagram and Obama in Phoenix last week]

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” (Or so said the British philosopher and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell.) So who is going to be left standing once U.S. and NATO forces have finished battling it out with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain came out with some interesting comments in a speech in Ohio last week on where he sees Afghanistan at the end of his first term in office in 2013, if he were to be elected president:

“The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven.”

Optimistic or realistic?

Digging around on the internet, you can find a different view. Back in April Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times Online, wrote that the Taliban were taking their inspiration from the Vietminh who chased the French out of what was known as Indochina in the 1950s.  He wrote that they were inspired by the Vietnamese commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu  in 1954.

Taking up the theme, the website openDemocracy  followed up by saying that the west tends to assume that it alone is watching the lessons of Vietnam. ”It is as if “only” the United States (and by extension western forces or combatants in general) have the capacity or the interest to draw lessons from the past,” it said. It called the reference to the Taliban looking for  inspiration in Vietnam ”startling and ominous”.

“In the early 1950s, the Vietminh - faced with an imbalance between their own forces and conventional French military power - concentrated on attacking isolated garrisons in the northern part of Vietnam well away from the main colonial centres of control…  This strategy, combined with attacks on French supply-lines, gradually wore down the French military and political leadership’s resolve. Now, it seems, the Taliban aim to do the same against an equivalently “asymmetrical” enemy: Nato, and the International Security Assistance Force forces in Afghanistan.”

So do we go with McCain, who has his own experience of Vietnam? Or the historical parallels with France, which like the United States today in Afghanistan and Iraq, was struggling to cope with guerrilla warfare, did not know how to win over the hearts and minds of the local population, and faced economic crisis at home and a general public which was tired of war in faraway places?

I thought it would be interesting to ask one of the retired Reuters correspondents who had covered Vietnam whether it was legitimate to compare it to Afghanistan and got the following reply from Bernard Edinger, a French reporter who was sent in from Paris before the fall of Saigon in 1975 and also covered Kabul when the Russians first went in with ground troops in 1979:

“Yes, America’s opponents all dream of seeing the US helicopter its people out of Kabul the same humiliating way they flew out of Saigon. I stood on a rooftop opposite the embassy and watched the last choppers go as thousands of local Vietnamese clamouring to be evacuated were abandoned. As you know, the Communists did not win the war, the Americans lost it - at home. The press and much of the public had turned against the war to the point that the politicians just no longer thought it was worth fighting,” he wrote.

“Obviously domestic opposition to US involvement in Afghanistan is far less than that over Vietnam because the horror of the Taliban regime is already known and the Western public has seen the execution by rifle fire of kneeling women in midfield at half-time at Kabul soccer matches , the condemned men hanging from the goalposts etc … Also, opposition to Vietnam was led by students who had the threat of army service before them if the war lasted whereas the US only commits pro soldiers to the war today.”

“An outright Taliban victory over the US is out of the question … But in asymmetric warfare, ‘the strong lose if they don’t win and the weak win if they survive.’ I’m quoting others. The Pathans outlasted Kipling’s British Indian army (and even slit the throat of the British ambassador in his residence) and the Soviet Army. All they have to do is hang in there.”
  

 Any other views out there?