Just google something like 'america could have won vietnam' or something similar, and you will see dozens of articles on the subject. Anti American propaganda won that war, with America also turning on itself and its leaders.
The Vietnam War was much like the Korean War and a part of the Cold War. Of course it never would have been fought without the enemy being international communism, a movement which largely got a free pass in the US and European MSM, and often still does.
Many of those communist leaders are forgotten today while the names of 'Tricky Dicky Nixon' and 'Ronald Raygun' are still familiar to everyone. The anti American propaganda campaign was the greatest and most successful in world history, and Hanoi Jane Fonda and her husband played a significant part in it.
with all due respect, i took you up on this. This is the best and really only "what if" I could find, please let me know if you have a better source.
If the United States had provided that level of support in 1975, when South Vietnam collapsed in the face of another North Vietnamese offensive,
the outcome might have been at least the same as in 1972....In 1974-75, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
The war we could have won http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/opinion/01morris.html
i tried to find the salient phrase or 2, that actually claims if the US hadn't withdrawn support;
somehow the ARVN forces could have stepped up and defeated, and unified Vietnam.
While it's true the US forces never lost a battle (as commonly stated) the US couldn't stay there in perpetuity.
Nixon's idea was "Vietnamization"; very similar to the 'transition' we are trying to accomplish as the ISAF forces withdrawl from Afganistan.
I don't buy either premise. It's not like we didn't give our all in Vietnam -
the prosecution of the war was escalated to carpet bombing, mining Hanoi's harbor, etc.
There isn't anything I can think of we didn't do that would have turned that war around,
to the point the S. Vietnamese could have taken control of the country.
The same thing is going to happen in Afganistan, if history is any guide.
As we leave security forces in place to somehow support the Afgan national forces; the Afgani forces have to be able to withstand the Talban.
The similarity of the Taliban to the Vietnam's Viet Cong, and the NVA is that those forces are more dedicated to winning.
That's what happened in Vietnam; no matter how much longer we stayed, in the end the S. Vietnamese didn't want to win badly enough.
Not being able to see the future, but seeing this template in play in Vietnam, i would assume, the same situtation will happen in Afg.
The Taliban are more dedicated to winning, and seizing the gov't -
even as the existing representative western style gov't in place is makig plans for a support role for the Talban.
In other words; both the V.C. and the Taliban were/are not going to settle for any power sharing arrangement