andyt andyt:
Vietnam at the very least supplied the Viet Cong. If the US had bombed N Vietnam the way they bombed Germany, they would not have been able to continue to resist.
The US actually dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than they did on Nazi Germany. The thing that people forget or don't realize today is that non-nuclear bombing of civilian population centers is a failure as a military strategy. Germany in 1945 was able to maintain, and even exceed, their average levels of wartime industrial manufacturing; the only thing that really caused the German loss in WW2 was the destruction of too many veteran human resources thanks to Hitler's stand-or-die orders and their inability to permanently secure a reliable fuel supply. The only real significance Allied bombing played was that it diverted remaining German air power and anti-aircraft artillery away from battlefield use in Normandy and Russia into anti-bomber roles to protect German cities. Aerial bombing can be said to be part of winning strategy but by itself it is vastly over-rated as a singular tactic. Neither German, Japanese, or North Vietnamese civilian populations, desite the casualties they suffered, turned against their regimes or even stopped showing up for work. As both a morale-breaker or a convincing infrastructure shatterer aerial bombing is a failure.
$1:
The Tet offensive certainly included the NVA - and as you say they actually lost. One of Vann's strategies was to pull out the NV general leading the NVA into a conventional assault and then hammer him. He got a big commendation for that one. I don't think just the VC could have defeated South Vietnam with US backing, at least in the short run. But for what - to prop up a corrupt regime for a few years more? Crazy.
The 1968 Tet offensive was actually a huge victory for the American military, and only became a propaganda victory for the Communists thanks to the co-operation of the anti-war US media (although it should be said that too many years of the US government lying about how "we are this close to final victory" would lead to the media becoming jaded when Tet showed that the Communists were far from finished). The Viet Cong was basically destroyed by Tet and never again played the same role that it was able to in the preceding five years of war. It's been said that the use of the Viet Cong as the main frontline attackers during Tet was actually a deliberate political tactic by the Communist leaders in Hanoi desinged to eliminate the Cong as a future political opponent. The Viet Cong were mostly a grassroots South Vietnamese organization that operated with relative independence away from the Hanoi leadership. By having the US military destroy the Viet Cong during Tet, the further political aims of the north were advanced as the end result of the battle was that the Viet Cong were no longer a self-sustainable and independent force. The remains were absorbed into the regular North Vietnamese forces. When the final overrun of the South occurred in 1975, the elimination of the Viet Cong as a potential political opponent paved the way for full top-to-bottom domination of the entire country by Hanoi.
$1:
But the main similarity between Vietnam and Astan is that the people we're supposedly fighting for are not behind us or appreciative of the effort. In Vietnam, Vann showed a strategy that would have put the people behind the US, but it was not adopted. In Astan I can't think of any approach that would make the mass of Astanis grateful for the NATO effort and willing to do their part.
Got that right. With a long history of foreigners arriving then leaving just as quickly the local Afghans have no reason to look at NATO as being anything more than another notch on the proverbial bedpost.