>>> This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror. <<<
Am I to suppose that the Vietcong WERE popular and had lots of support in South Vietnam and Cambodia, aside from what they secured through terror?
This doesn’t accord with the history I’ve read, especially for the period of time after Tet.
Am I to suppose that the Vietcong WERE popular and had lots of support in South Vietnam and Cambodia, aside from what they secured through terror?
This doesn’t accord with the history I’ve read, especially for the period of time after Tet.
Yeah. I'm no expert on the subject. But I also suspect we had that war won, and allowed a traitor ridden Congress to piss of the victory.
The North Vietnamese threw everything they had into three major offensives: '68, '72 (IIRC) and '75.
They got badly beaten the first two times, and only succeeded on the third occasion because by then the American Congress had cut off nearly all aid, and fatally weakened morale by otherwise undermining and deligitimizing the South Vietnamese government and armed forces at every opportunity.
Of course this will never be widely admitted until long after the last morsel of flesh from the last 60's "New Left" radical has been expelled from the south end of a north bound worm.
Actually the truth is something like that. The side we were backing were the heirs of the French colonials, large landholders extracting oppressive rents from peasants.
One of the problems with Vietnam was that socially, economically and politically we were not on the right side of the war. Thus winning hearts and minds was nearly an impossible task, not that that is a tactic we tried much of.
It was one of the worst fought wars in the history of warfare. We completely overmatched the other side militarily and still managed to keep so much of the population against us that anything like winning was impossible.
I don’t like him, but he did a good thing writing this opposition to zer0’s naive plan. When I heard hussein wanted to give the Taliban part of governing Afghani people I thought of the book “The Bookseller of Kabul” an excellent account of how they “govern” and the trouble with the customs there in daily life for women. Zer0 tries to preach to us like an anthropology professor on how the “indigenous society” is best for the residents even if they live in the 11th century.