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The recent request by the senior US military commander in Afghanistan for more troops has provoked the question of whether Afghanistan could be Barack Obama's Vietnam. There are certainly difficult issues for the Western nations that have troops in Afghanistan, but there is really no analogy with the American role in Vietnam during the 1960s and early 70s.

The most important difference between the two conflicts is that the so-called war in Afghanistan is not a war in any conventional sense.

This might, no doubt, strike the troops under fire there as a matter of semantics, but they are really engaged in a police action against the Taliban, a group of insurgents whose support is confined to some regions of thecountry.

In the 60s, in contrast, the US was essentially...