The last question that needs to be answered as concerns the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam is why we are not pursuing a campaign of territorial conquest. In Vietnam, the U.S. did not seek to gain and maintain control of territory; rather they sought to combat only the military forces of the insurgents. That is why the now legendary “body count†was so important in Vietnam. The same thing is not happening in Afghanistan, at least to the extent that the “body count†is important. The metric I see being used to determine progress in Afghanistan in place of the “body count†is tracking how many attacks occur within delineated sectors of territory. This metric is probably just as useless in determining victory or progress, as was the body count. So many factors go into determining how many attacks occur in a given region that the actual number of attacks is meaningless.
Samual Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 22-49 This article set off a debate in academia that continues to this day. What Huntington argues in the paper is that after the fall of communism in 1989, the world is no longer looking at a standoff between ideologies but that the world will revert to clashes between civilizations. The basic thesis is that the ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism covered over or subsumed the natural differences between civilizations. He argues that prior to the end of the Cold War the conflicts that shaped history were primarily Western and have gone through three phases since … More after the Jump…