I’ve quoted Quigley before. He’s an insightful writer.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: In Afghanistan, the Question Is Everything 

By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer
      As President Obama weighs his options in Afghanistan, the disquiet that Afghanistan will become another Vietnam grows.
    If the United States is to avoid another Vietnam in Afghanistan, the Obama administration needs to understand the short-term failure in Southeast Asia (short-term because Vietnam became a trading partner and regional ally of the United States) was a result of our complete lack of understanding about Vietnamese culture and society. American policymakers, products of a Western, rationalist, future-oriented culture, kept pushing buttons and pulling levers that connected to nothing in Vietnam’s Confucian, animist, ancestor-focused culture. The Americans could never find the buttons and levers that did connect to something.
    Afghanistan’s culture and society could not be less like our own. Until Barack Obama is certain he knows what buttons and levers connect to something in Afghanistan’s tribal, multilingual, Islamic culture (and there is not a lot of evidence that he does), additional troops won’t accomplish anything useful there.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: In Afghanistan, the Question Is Everything