Four years ago the Dems and NYT were telling us that Afghanistan will be another Viet Nam. The Russians fought them for seven years and gave up and we'd end up doing the same. It was hopeless, they said.
Today an ABC News poll in Afghanistan"”the first national survey there sponsored by a news organization"”underscores those challenges in a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary Afghans. Poverty is rampant, medical care and other basic services almost non-existent, and infrastructure minimal. Nearly six in 10 have no electricity in their homes, and just 3 percent have it around the clock. Seven in 10 Afghan adults have no more than an elementary education; half have no schooling whatsoever. Half have household incomes under $500 a year.
Yet despite these and other deprivations, 77 percent of Afghans say their country is headed in the right direction"”compared with just 30 percent in our country. Ninety-one percent prefer the current Afghan government to the Taliban regime, and 87 percent call the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban good for their country. Osama bin Laden, for his part, is as unpopular as the Taliban; nine in 10 view him unfavorably.
And today the Dems and NYT are telling us that Iraq will be another Viet Nam. We need to pull out.
While some naysayers are predicting Iraq to be another Viet Nam, others see a vision of another Afghanistan.
Four years ago the Dems and NYT were telling us that Afghanistan will be another Viet Nam. The Russians fought them for seven years and gave up and we'd end up doing the same. It was hopeless, they said.
I don't remember the democrats saying this about Afghanistan. Please provide some sources.
UD,
my recollection from the time was that the Afganistan operation enjoyed wide bipartisan support, and the vast majority of Ds supported the action (with the caveat that there's rarely unanimous support in this country for anything). Iraq was, of course, a different issue.
In fact, the military plan implemented to put troops in afganistan was (hold on to your hats) a contingency plan put together in the waning years of the Clinton administration.
How about John Kerry for one. But then Kerry's world still revolves around his questionable 90 days in VN. He compares everthing to Nam.
Since Vietnam, we have sent troops to Grenada, El Salvador, Lebanon, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. And every time liberals have considered it the height of wordly insight and sophistication to worry that "this might be another Vietnam."
A Nexis-Lexis search shows between October 1, 2001, and October 1, 2002, the New York Times ran nearly 300 articles with the words Vietnam and Afghanistan in them. The invasion wasn't a week old before the libs began to use their favorite military term-- quagmire. They need to get over Vietnam-- it was a unique place and time in history and there won't be another.
Boysda, I recall reading in Tom Franks' American Soldier that no battle plan existed for Afghanistan when W asked for one. According to him they worked night and day to come up with one in record time.
The poignant fact in the ABC poll is that Afghans who have so little other than a new-found democracy consider themselves to be better off than we Americans who have so much more of everything.
Will Iraq turn out to be a successful democracy? Only time will tell. However I think it was a chance we needed to take and If it goes our way, it will certainly be worth the cost. This from a Vietnaum Veteran who saw 50,000 plus of my countrymen give it all for this cause which was thrown away for nothing. Something which the Liberals would like to see us do again. TO He!! with them.[:@]
Another Viet Nam...
