Read about the British experience in Malaya and you will have a much better idea.
Can you imagine if we had to destroy the Nazi war machine and have make the German people like us at the same time.
Moot point. You are confusing apples and oranges. WWII was a conventional war.
We we're fighting a regular NVA army not the viet cong which were decimated during Tet.
If we were fighting a regular war after Tet, why was a lot of energy being spent into pacification programs using combined US/Vietnamese forces? Those certainly were not implemented to go after an 'Army' in the conventional sense of the word. Maybe if Abrams would have replaced Westmoreland a few years before Tet the war would have had a different outcome.... with or without the support of the American public.
There are no hearts and minds to be won in the Afghan badlands, just Taliban and jihadists to be crushed and our guys and the NATO guys, backed by our air support, have been doing just that, killing them by the hundreds every time they find them.
Pacification worked well, Abrams was doing a good job.
Unfortunately General Giap had won the "hearts and minds" of the left and the MSM. Fifth columns are way tougher to beat than insurgents.
The Brittish in Malaya is a common used example of succesful HAM COIN policy.
In other words, succesful HAM resulted in the Brittish being forced to withdraw from one of their imperial holdings. Even when succesful, HAM doesn't work.
This idea that an insurgency is at a basic level different from a conventional war is ridiculous. Caesar put down the insurgency in Gaul the same way we defeated the Nazis and the Japanese - through destruction of their military capabilities and wholesale slaughter of their civilian population.