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.
The Opening Months of World War I in the East and Elsewhere
The opening months of World War I on the Eastern Front did not proceed at as the German General Staff thought they would. When General Alfred von Schlieffen (1833-1912) was drawing up the German war plan that would subsequently bear his name, he made several assumptions about the Russian army that would prove to be false. The most glaring incorrect assumption was the Germans estimate of the time it would take the Russian army to take the offensive. The German General Staff assumed it would the take the Russians at least forty days to complete mobilization and begin their offensive. This was the amount of time they … More after the Jump…