One of George Lucas’ first projects as a director was going to be filiming the John Milius script that became APOCALYPSE NOW (Coppola was just going to produce – and, note that this was going to happen while the war was still going on). Milius and Lucas worked on it intermittently, but other projects pushed it to the back burner: first, AMERICAN GRAFFITI and then STAR WARS. Lucas ended up folding some of his and Milius’ ideas from the Vietnam project into STAR WARS, and, after he finished it, realized he had “said” all he needed to say on the subject. But in Lucas’ reading of his film, the Empire/Stormtroopers represented the Americans, and the Rebels were the North Vietnamese.

I believe that Mr. Walt has asked the wrong question, i.e. “Does the United States really want to base its military strategy on two enormous blunders?” The current and proposed military strategy is not based on those two blunders. Rather it same strategy as was used in Vietnam, attack and destroy the enemies political and military infrastructure. The problem is that the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, and al Qaeda and the various drug gangs do not have much in the way of infrastructure. What they do have can be attacked, destroyed, and rebuild in a matter of days. Some of it does not even belong to those forces. Highway 4 in Kandahar Province is widely used route to move supplies between Afghanistan and Pakistan by many forces. It cannot be attacked and destroyed, it is owned and maintained by the Kabul Government. Some of the infrastructure comes from the Frontier Corps and the ISI of Pakistan.

As always, we have to return to Von Clausewitz, military strategy has to be based on the political objective that is to be achieved. The political objective is to eliminate the insurgency from Afghanistan to prevent the insurgent forces from seizing power and allowing al-Qaeda from using Afganistan as a base for more 9-11 type attacks on the US. Can that objective be achieved through solely military means?

Imagine tomorrow the entire opium trade vanished and every Afghan insurgent was killed by predator drones. Within a few years, the same, or very similar problem would exist. The people of southwest Asia see their world as being exploited and under attack by forces of western Europe and the United States (“the faranji”). So long as that condition exists, there will be a constant demand for some sort of resistance and someone will rise to answer that demand. Iran would be more than happy to fill the gap left by the destruction of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, &c.