WASHINGTON -- I had a flashback recently when I read a Washington Post news story about how the U.S. commander in Afghanistan thinks he may need many thousands more troops to win the war.
Shades of Vietnam. Do we ever learn?
It brought back memories of the late Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Southeast Asia, who kept escalating the troop numbers after the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam. His strategy produced a debacle for us.
Fast forward to Afghanistan, 2009.
Now seven years into the war there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is in the middle of a 60-day assessment of the war, due next month. But a Washington Post article says he has been giving Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates weekly updates about the need to bolster the size of the Afghan army and police force and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. trainers and advisers.
The present Pentagon plan calls for about 68,000 U.S. troops to be in Afghanistan by late this year.
Afghanistan, which once harbored Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida training camps, has been on Obama's agenda since his presidential campaign. Now it's his war -- big time -- even as it takes on the appearance of another quagmire for U.S. forces in their effort to quell the Taliban and Al-Qaida fighters.
Gates is expected to go along with whatever McChrystal concludes is necessary. So is Obama, a neophyte who has taken on the mission defined by the Bush administration, apparently without hesitation.
