Military intelligence for the rest of us. A weekly column posted every Monday.
A half-century after Walter Cronkite told us we couldn’t win in Vietnam, the U.S. ignores his counsel in Afghanistan
By: Mark Thompson | March 5, 2018
For those of us of a certain age, it’s hard to believe it has been 50 years since Walter Cronkite warned us that we were on our way to a draw in Vietnam. “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” he said after returning from a reporting trip to Vietnam in 1968. I was on the cusp of 16 at the time. That means the war in Afghanistan has been going on longer than I had been alive when Cronkite declared there would be no American victory in southeast Asia.
Related
The Pentagon’s 21st Century Icarus
When It Comes to War, “The Blank Check Just Got Bigger”