President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy is unschooled and carefree with lives and money. The president and senior staff sally forth with claims of progress in an attempt to conceal a defeat reminiscent of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon in the Vietnam War. Senator George Aiken’s sage advice of 1966 went unheeded: declare victory in Vietnam and leave. Instead, President Obama, like his predecessor, mulishly insisted on putting tens of thousands of American soldiers in harm’s way. He should have remembered that last episode, when his predecessors squandered over $750 billion fighting an enemy we are now defending against China over the South China Sea.

 

North Vietnam’s defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 left the national security of the United States unimpaired. Dominoes did not fall. The United States was not attacked. In fact, trade ensued. And the United States is redressing the environmental damage inflicted by Agent Orange in Vietnam and the illnesses and ailments of our own Vietnam veterans caused by exposure to the toxin. On August 9, 2012, U.S. ambassador to Vietnam David B. Shear declared: “This morning we celebrate a milestone in our bilateral relationship. We’re cleaning up this mess.”

 

Like a recidivist, President Obama is repeating the Vietnam War crime of monumental stupidity in Afghanistan. And Afghan commander John R. Allen’s recent Pollyannaish assessment of the Afghan War in the Washington Post echoes General William Westmoreland’s 1967 illusion of “light at the end of the tunnel” in the Vietnam War...