Afghanistan is Vietnam redux. Again the U.S. has never lost a battle and again that is irrelevant. As in Vietnam, the puppet government is incompetent, corrupt and illegitimate.

 Little surprise that as in Vietnam only American soldiers are willing to fight and die for such an illegitimate travesty. After 11 years, the Afghan National Army has maybe 100,000 men present for duty (the rest exist only on paper). More than 40 percent of the entire force evaporates every year fromdesertions and non-reenlistment, 75 percent is on drugs, and enough are Taliban infiltrators to sabotage the advisory effort. The Afghan army has no logistics, no air force apart from a few old Soviet helicopters, and still not one battalion can fight on its own. The South Vietnamese Army had over one million men, capable logistics and a large, modern air force. In a country one-fourth the size of Afghanistan, it collapsed in three weeks of fighting.

It is a myth that the war was lost by invading Iraq. It was lost in the C.I.A. stage production called the “Bonn Process,” where a non-entity named Hamid Karzai was foisted on astonished Afghan leaders. When 75 percent of the delegates at the Loya Jirga petitioned to make the king the interim head of state, C.I.A. shenanigans and millions of dollars in bribes killed the indigenous process. Forgetting the lesson of postwar Japan, American “advisers” then insisted on eliminating a ceremonial monarchy, which would have provided a symbol of national unity (like the Japanese emperor) and lent traditional legitimacy to an alien system called democracy.