Viet Nam or Afghanistan. Lessons.

I don't often find anything to write about on Morning Jo on MSNBC in the morning, but this morning they had a segment where they talked about the Afghan war, the casualties and especially about the wounded, both physically and mentally and our obvious inability to provide the proper care for them. Ariana Huffington (Huffington Post) and Nicholas Kristof (N Y Times editorialist) were the guests. Watching the show, I tried to figure out how come. How come we can spend unquestioned billions on prosecuting this war but can't seem to put together enough to support the troops who are wounded. Don't get me wrong, our politicians talk a good story. Even we the people are indignant when told of how these veterans are left untreated. But everybody knows talk is cheap. I think one way to explain the problem is to compare it to another protracted war. No, not Iraq. While it was protracted, it really is a mirror image of Afghanistan in this respect. I mean we need to look at Viet Nam. Both had histories of colonial warfare in which the outsiders finally lost and pulled out. For Viet Nam it was the French, for Afghanistan it was the Soviets. Both were and are countries with customs and a society we did not and do not clearly understand. Both had corrupt governments, both were a severe challenge to modern warfare, in fact both are more suited to gorilla warfare. A lot of similarities. The differences, for America, were/are that in Vietnam, we had the draft, troops served only one tour, at least for the most part, one and done and it was paid for by taxes. Afghanistan on the other hand is handled by an all volunteer military. Better trained, better equipped, but by far and away it's fought by multiple deployments and we're not paying for the war. Not yet. So when you have to borrow the money to fight this war from a potential, even real enemy in some sense, and you have to ask the same small number of people to fight the war, the public seems to forget the costs of the war. Also, the reason that far more troops were being killed in Viet Nam, is because of greatly improved medical handling of the injured. But similar numbers of troops are being shot. Just not as many are dying. So how did that Viet Nam thing turn out? We pretended a victory and ran. There are some things we do well. We nearly always win battles. We're not always so lucky with wars. Unless we're allowed to go toe to toe. And after we left Viet Nam? After we left, we didn't owe an enemy for the cost of the war. And while returning troops from Viet Nam weren't treated very well by the public, the government failed to properly care for the wounded until finally forced to. Does any of this sound familiar? America is good at fighting an enemy it can see, but not one they can't find hidden in the populace. We're getting better at covert warfare, but you have to choose what kind of war you're going to fight. Politicians have figured out that it's easier to get the public to go along with a war they can put on the credit card and they love to pretend we can build governments and create democracies where there were none.Therefore, I recommend we demand that any future war be paid for by taxation for that war. And that should include any conflict we engage in and nobody should be asked to serve more than one tour in that war or conflict.  To declare war should automatically carry with it, conscriptions. No exceptions. I'll bet we don't go to war very often after that.