The question caught my attention on CNN's home page, not only because of Obama's speech later this evening, but because we connected the two wars today in class. However, after the opening question, the article went on to say that "experts" were claiming that while there are similarities between the two wars, there are even more differences. A few similarities are the troop increases (soon to be, in Afghanistan's case), the government the US supports is the minority and faced with corruption charges, and the fact that we are fighting "mostly poor, rural insurgents". This, however, proves one of the most difficult problems we face because insurgents can stay forever; they are at home. The only difference that was explicitly stated was the larger presence of a national identity in Afghanistan than there was in South Vietnam. To me, it seemed like the article had more to say on the similarities than they did on the differences. Maybe they wanted it to sound like Obama's fight in Afghanistan is similar to Vietnam, but I am still unsure as to how much the two wars actually mirror one another.
What do you think? Is the war in Afghanistan very similar to the war in Vietnam? What about president Obama's influence on the war?
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