History does repeat itself

Vietnam was my generation's war. My generation fought it on the orders of our elders

Afghanistan is a new generation's war. It is being fought on the orders of the new elders -- Baby Boomers.

You'd think we would have learned from our history. Today's Afghanistan is yesterday's Vietnam, and there seems no clear way out.

It's eerie, this sense that we've been here before.

Vietnam had the Viet Cong. Afghanistan has the Taliban. Vietnam had guerrilla attacks. Afghanistan has IUDs. Vietnam had the Pentagon Papers. Afghanistan has WikiLeaks. Vietnam had presidents Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican. Afghanistan has presidents George Bush, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Back then, the political justification for fighting in Vietnam was the Domino Theory -- if we let one country fall to Communism then the dominoes would fall under Communist domination. The political justification for Afghanistan is global terrorism -- we root out the evil doers there and we'll unsow the seeds that grew the 9/11 attacks and the many attacks worldwide since.

We tried to do it then, as we're trying to do it now, by propping up a corrupt central government with American money and American troops.

In Vietnam it was Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu. In Afghanistan it's Hamid Karzai.

And we're stalemated. Whatever progress that is made in one area is undone in another area. And we constantly worry, as we did in Vietnam, whether the masses of civilian population really support their government and the efforts of U.S. troops.

When newsman Walter Cronkite questioned the sense of continuing the Vietnam War in a CBS broadcast in 1968, he said, in part: "To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion."

Johnson, upon hearing the broadcast, said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Johnson, of course, bailed as president, deciding not to run for re-election, leaving it to Nixon to continue the fight and, ultimately, give it up.

Maybe it's time for Brian Williams, the current dean of American news anchors, to reach the same conclusion on Afghanistan on an NBC news broadcast.

Afghanistan has become our longest war, a different war certainly than the world wars, but not so different from Vietnam. July was its deadliest month with 60 American casualties.

When will we ever learn?