Q. Afghanistan has swallowed up dozens of armies � do we really want another Vietnam?
A. In fact, Alexander the Great and the British alike were eventually successful there, and at last defeated far greater armies with their own very small forces far from home. The Russians gave up because they sought, insanely, to replace Islam with atheism � and yet after a decade quit only due to sophisticated American support to their enemies, and their own collapsing society at home. How strange that, before the bombing started, we were told that Afghanistan was too formidable to attack � and then after we obliterated much of the command and control structure of the Taliban we are now "bullying" an "asset-poor" country. That Afghanistan might be more difficult than the Gulf War hardly makes it Vietnam. In fact, so successful and brilliant have been our war-makers in the last decade that we now define a three-week war � with hundreds, if not more likely thousands, of enemy dead, and fewer than five of ours � as "protracted."