If we pull out of Afghanistan, might we get a repeat of the war in Vietnam?

You are absolutely correct.

And Putin is the one to gain !!

Yahtzee !

There are some parallels. We attempted to defeat the Taliban, it failed, they are still strong, and the flimsy secular U.S.-backed government we propped up will probably fall to the Taliban if we leave.

South Vietnam lost because most Vietnamese at that time leaned more to the North and the South Vietnamese officials were frantic because they were so used to asking America for help. The day both regions were reunited, a tank from the North just blasted through the door of the “president’s” home and there was very little opposition. It was as if whoever inside knew something like that was to come sooner or later.

Well not really most people, but the majority of the people who were willing to fight were. The others just fled to the US or other places.

Afghanistan could be the same if enough people follow the same ideology like in Vietnam and one side is too scared to put up a real fight. I don’t know about the situation in Afghanistan though.

A few months ago there was news of Afghanistan peace talks and the general tone was “whew, glad all the unpleasantness can end now. Golly.”

A reporter on the radio talked to Afghan women about the consequences of a return to Taliban rule. They were dreading it.

The US has squandered so much money there fighting an unwinnable war. I wonder what could have been done if that amount were spent instead on infrastructure, education, health care, and institution building.

Mimi, I think Taliban Afghanistan is more like Khmer Rouge Cambodia, not Vietnam.

Remember – the Russians bailed out Afghanistan 25 years ago because they knew there was no way to win against the Taliban.

So George Bush went in on false pretense and here we are 19 years later.

The US will never “win” there. Get the hell out.

@Call_Me_Jay oh God… If that is true I don’t think anything good will come out if the Taliban has the full reign over the country.

The reason why Vietnam is doing well today is because Vietnam had a long history of fighting off invaders since the ancient time. So when America came people were just like “another invaders to fight off”. Also most people at that time was extremely poor and uneducated as a result of the previous fight with France, they didn’t have enough mental capacity to understand what Communism or Capitalism was. So what outsiders thought was Communist mentality was simply “Ho Chi Minh good, America bad”, nothing more. And people were just too focused on getting America out of their land to care what ideology was being stuffed inside their head.

And even Ho Chi Minh’s government wasn’t that fixated on Communism, so they were able to see the faults in the system during the 1980s and corrected them, preventing the country from going down like the Soviet Union. So all in all, to Vietnamese the war was just another fight against another invader.

I don’t see the same thing in Afghanistan. The war there could end with one side being squashed by the other like in Vietnam, but I don’t think things would be better in the long term. The situation in Vietnam is just too fundamentally different to Afghanistan.

@Mimishu1995 I agree with everything you wrote.

@Mimishu1995 Another key difference is that Afghanistan is a collection of tribes and has little national cohesion, even before the Soviet invasion. It really has never been a functioning state. Maintaining any kind of government in that country is a challenge.

There won’t be boatloads of people escaping from Afghanistan. Anyone that would have done that left long ago. To what @Demosthenes said, it will devolve into small areas controlled by warlords the way it was before the fall of 2001.

Possibly. But Afghanistan has been the way they are for a long time. Russia tried taking them over and they did to Russia the exact same thing they did to us…fought a guerrilla style war that cost their opponents a lot of equipment and lives with no gain. If we pull out I don’t expect much will change there. As much as we talk about the Taliban being subdued, they aren’t gone. And once we are they will spring back into life.

To me. It’s as simple as it isn’t our fight.
The US, should pull out, and let history do It’s thing. US involvement will simply overcomplicate any chances of peace….
The US, has yet to learn, that we don’t understand their society and therefore, cannot change it.

@MrGrimm888 Agreed. We should never have been in Afghanistan in the first place. Iraq was bad enough, but there was no reason to go further.

^I think it was just Cheney, playing Bush like a fool, while Cheney made millions. He made money destroying Iraq, and made more money, by rebuilding some of it.
I used to hate Bush. But. After he was POTUS, I saw that he felt used by Cheney, and he was. It wasn’t his fault that he was gullible, and should never had been POTUS, in the first place…
Bush, was a classic example of failing upwards.
He was,IMO, the main reason for the Taliban, and other groups forming.
I know a lot people who were involved in both wars. Ex-military, and otherwise.
Their opinions are that the ME, is a culture that westerners, don’t understand. Lots of differences between their culture, and ours. Attempting to force our thinking, like democracy, will never work.
Essentially, we killed a lot of people, for nothing more than making them hate America.

My father, served two tours in Vietnam. The main thing he took from it, is it’s a different culture. Invading a country, and killing lots of people, including civilians, doesn’t help anything.

It just seems to hurt both sides.
If anything, it seems to strengthen the resolve of the “bad guys.”
It seems, to me, that it’s best to stay out of the scenario.
Nobody elected the US, to be the world’s police…

Most of the US’s military actions seem to be met by resentment…