> they’ll just do like the North Vietnamese and wait the 14 months, take over with a totalitarian regime <
No doubt about it. The parallels between the Vietnam War and the Afghan War are eerie. But Bush II had one advantage LBJ didn’t have. Bush had the lessons of Vietnam right before him. Bush should have known what not to do.
Bush repeated most of LBJ’s mistakes anyway. George W. Bush - the worst foreign policy president ever. I’d even rank him below Wilson, as bad as Wilson was.
In South Vietnam we were aiding an ally who lost nearly 1.4 million people during the war; the footage of those people scrambling to escape communism in April 1975 indicated what we were fighting for.
I don’t believe that ally exists in Afghanistan; the USSR was there for the same reason, and had the same problem with Afghan troops turning on them. As in South Vietnam, the government the USSR supported lived a few years after their departure, then it fell apart.