Vietnam then, Afghanistan now

In late March President Barack Obama unveiled his new policy for dealing with the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that is escalating and drawing the United States into deeper involvement in Central Asia.  There was something of an eerie déjà vu to the president’s new policy. It was reminiscent of a previous policy put forward by a former US president in another conflict: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 decision to dispatch thousands of additional combat troops and civilian advisers to Vietnam — a major step in the escalation of the war. In his speech to the nation, President Obama said that sending civilian advisers to Afghanistan was paramount to winning the war. In 1964, the US had 23,300 civilian advisers in Southeast Asia, and we know the outcome of that war. US policymakers in the mid-1960s feared that if Vietnam fell to the communists, it would only be a matter