Both wars ended badly, with U.S. efforts in tatters. But they were worlds apart in who fought, how and what came of it.
When a comparison was made between the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago and a similar debacle in Vietnam 46 years earlier, President Biden and his administration recoiled.
Vietnam and Afghanistan were America’s two longest wars. Yet despite a number of similarities, including mistakes made and disastrous denouements that spelled defeat for the U.S., each conflict had entirely different impacts on U.S. society, culture and politics.The two wars started differently and for very different reasons. And they were fought differently — in different technological eras and, in particular, with very different armies.
Nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam, and about 3,000 in Afghanistan. At the war’s height, half a million U.S. troops were in Vietnam; the number in Afghanistan reached 100,000 for about a two-year period, but mostly remained far lower. This was not the case with Afghanistan because, as a result of Vietnam, enlisting in the military is now on a voluntary basis. Chances are most Americans, Hall said, “don’t have the same type of personal consequence in the Afghanistan war.”
“The Afghanistan war was one America entered with a strong bipartisan consensus in favor. Not so, Vietnam,” said Daniel Serwer, who directs conflict and U.S. foreign policy programs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In addition, he noted, “the protests against the war in Vietnam were partly fueled by racial issues, as the draft hit Blacks particularly hard and the civil rights movement immediately preceded.
As the war in Vietnam reached into American households, the argument of “what are we doing there” grew intense, said Rajan Menon, a political scientist and specialist in global ethics at City University of New York and Columbia University. Vietnam ended the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson when he decided not to run for reelection in 1968 amid growing antiwar sentiment that would have likely led to his loss. The war at first helped Richard Nixon but ultimately was partly responsible for his demise. Aggressive bombing in North Vietnam shored up his right-wing base ahead of his landslide victory over then-South Dakota Sen.
“He had a real bee in his bonnet about Afghanistan,” said a senior military official who participated in Oval Office meetings during the Obama administration. He asked for anonymity to discuss internal conversations. “He felt like Obama was getting jammed.” Another reason may be that journalists, who often write the first draft of history as well as movie scripts, were given remarkable access to the battlefield in Vietnam, but severely restricted in later U.S. wars.
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