As I visited Viet Nam from the top to the bottom last month, I began to realize there are a great many parallels between the conflict in Viet Nam and Afghanistan. I hope our young and inexperienced President is taking his time understanding these parallels, their implications, and learns from them.

Here’s what I noticed:

1. We installed a US favorable puppet government in both cases, both corrupt to the highest levels and without local popular support. One failed, the other will!

2. Drug money fueled a lot of our covert effort from the Golden triangle composed of the intersection of Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam, and now it’s the poppy fields of Afghanistan. We can’t/won’t stop it because we need a lot of the dollars it generates to advance our agenda. Shame on us!

3. The local indigenous population sees us as “occupiers” not as “liberators.”

4. The enemy is virtually unrecognizable, citizens by day, warriors by night. And they live in the local villages so “innocents” are always killed as we advance, playing directly into their PR hands as well as our press who is anything but an impartial reporter.

5. The domino theory is alive and well. We were afraid if we didn’t win in Viet Nam we’d lose all of Southeast Asia, and now we’re afraid that if we don’t stop Al-Qaida and the Taliban we’ll lose the region. Turns out it wasn’t true then, and it isn’t now. These indigenous people are country loyal, they are distrustful of those around them and for good reason and they won’t easily be dominated by a neighbor. Never have, never will!

6. Viet Nam was and Afghanistan is a political war. Lyndon Johnson ran it from the White House just as Barrack Obama is attempting to. Here’s the problem, we don’t totally trust the Generals because we know victory thru overwhelming force is their goal, as it should be! Johnson’s response was to reluctantly agree to force increases, many of these increases were hidden from us, and now Obama is doing the same thing – sending in “support” troops and not telling the US citizens, and then sending in another 34,000 (as we’re told he’s about to do) when he was asked for 40,000, and the incremental creep begins!

7. Johnson couldn’t tell us what a “win” looked like, and now Obama doesn’t even want to use the word “win” - but we all know what a loss looks like, especially the loss of fine young men and women.

8. Is the Karzai government really any better than the Taliban? Take a look at a few of the laws they’ve passed recently – women have gone backward, hard to imagine, but true! And if the population wants, even embraces and protects the Taliban, and they do, why is it our problem to fix?

9. If the end is the same as well, we’ll declare victory, while effectively surrendering and leave at some point in the future – shouldn’t we do it now? Read The Lone Survivor, a terrific true story – it gives a great sense of what it’s like there day in and day out.

It’s foreign, way over there, and not a part of our consciousness very often, se we just it continue on hoping for the victory miracle that just doesn’t happen-let’s not let it happen all over again—let’s call it a day and come home now!