Oliver North corrects the record on America's longest war

The U.S. Army’s campaigns against Geronimo, Cochise and other Apache leaders in New Mexico, Arizona and Texas went on continuously for nearly 40 years. Though Afghanistan has surpassed Vietnam in duration, it isn’t even our longest foreign military engagement. That distinction belongs to U.S. military operations during the Philippine Insurrection that began concurrently with the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and lasted until 1913. Notably, the total U.S. casualties suffered in the Philippines – more than 7,100 – approximate U.S. casualties to date in Afghanistan.

All of this begs the question: why all the false comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan? The short answer – mainstream-media ignorance – is too easy. The stark differences between Afghanistan and Vietnam – how they started, the nature of our enemies, and how they were, and are, being fought ought to be obvious to anyone.

In Vietnam we went to war to support a beleaguered ally that was being over-run by a foreign-directed insurgency and an invading army that was directly supported by two super-powers, the Soviet Union and Communist China. The military force we sent to fight in Southeast Asia was largely conscripted and eventually disheartened by dissention at home. During the war more than 58,200 U.S. Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Guardsmen and Marines were killed and another 153,000 were wounded. Nearly 2,500 remain missing in action.

We went to war in Afghanistan because radical Islamic terrorists who launched from there killed 3,000 innocents on U.S. soil on 9-11-01. The enemy we face there today is an opium-financed insurgency that obtains support from elements in Pakistan and Iran – but nothing on the scale of what our enemies received in Vietnam. The all-volunteer U.S. military deployed in the shadows of the Hindu Kush is the best educated, most technologically advanced and now, the most combat-experienced fighting force the world has ever seen. To date over 1,080 Americans have been killed in action, more than 6,200 have been wounded and we have one MIA.

... there are few parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan. The only real similarity is in the possible outcome. We had better pray they are not the same – for the disaster wrought in Vietnam nearly wrecked our military.