“We (screwed) up the end game,” Mr. Wilson said. “It would have been very easy and done for a minuscule amount of money. We should have done the basic things for a backward country that’s trying to come out of (a war) and have a reasonable hope of economic success.”<\/p>\n
As President Obama considers whether to send tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson worries that the war could become “another Vietnam.”<\/p>\n
“It’s probably best to make a calculated withdrawl,” he said. “If I were the president, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’d probably shut it down, rather than lose a lot of soldiers and treasure.”<\/p>\n
He says this as someone who knows as well as anyone just how fierce and tenacious the Afghan fighters are.<\/p>\n
“I’d rather take on a chain saw,” Mr. Wilson said. “They’re the world’s best foot soldiers, best warriors. And they’re fearless.<\/p>\n
“They’re fearless, and they’ve got nothing to lose. And they have a pretty serious hatred for those who try to occupy their country.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In a nutshell he explains why Vietnam and Afghanistan are alike. If you are there, and you are an occupier, they will hate you.<\/p>\n
Barack Obama should listen, but I think that instead he will listen to general officers who never learned the lesson of Vietnam.<\/p>\n
As I have said many times, the US military believes that we lost because the American public turned against the war, when the reality is that the Vietnamese beat us (without winning a single battle, BTW), because nationalism creates unity and self sacrifice against the occupier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You remember Tom Hanks played him, and he allegedly the one who made the Soviet Union’s Afghan war so disastrous. Well, now, 2 years off a heart transplant, he has something to say about our role in Afghanistan, get out now: “We (screwed) up the end game,” Mr. Wilson said. “It would have been very …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,1011,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-history","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}