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Afghanistan and Vietnam:
I did not hear the entire discussion but I heard a lot. What I did not hear, incredibly, is any mention of 9-11 or the reasons we went to war in the first place. In Vietnam it was advertised to be about preventing the spread of communism. In Afghanistan it was, and continues to be, about preventing terrorist attacks in the US. The Vietcong had no such intention. You can talk all day long about exit strategies, the Karzai government, etc., but preventing religious fanatics, who believe that G-d wants them to to spread their ideology using unlimited violence, is the reason we are there and should remain there no matter how long it takes.

There is an easy answer -- actually fight a war to win without worrying about civilian casualties. Had JFK sent in the USAF to the Bay of Pigs, Castro would have been gone by 1962 and all the communist revolutions in South America would have been still born; and millions of deaths avoided. Had Nixon gone full tilt into Cambodia in Spring 1970 - we would have destroyed the bulk of the NVA and they would have sued for peace with two Viet Nams. We also would have avoided the killing fields of Cambodia later on. Millions of lives would have been saved. In Iraq, had we lit up the terrorist strongholds without regard to where they were hiding behind their grandmas or mosques, we would have defeated the various Iraqi insurgencies in a year or so and avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths. The real lesson that both military and intelligence professionals know, but sissy politicians avoid is spare the rod - lose the war and millions of lives - the traditional liberal way to disaster.

Can Professor Goldstein comment on the "hold the cities" strategy of McChrystal's? Wouldn't this simply lead to the Taliban's surrounding the cities and then overrunning them?

But there are huge differences.

1) Vietnam was not the training ground for terrorists who attacked this country. We need to make sure that Afganistan doesn't train or create new terrorists

2) Vietnam did not did have a nuclear armed neighbor which is also a hot bed of terrorism and who is also training people to attack Americans.

The stakes are much higher than Vietnam.

And as a side note, Vietnam was not the center of global oil production (Iraq)

i don't understand why people why people are so surprised the US is in Afg' after 8 years, I recall mr.bush referring to it as 'the long war' initially some thought it would go for 10-15 years.