Obama risks going down in history ........

Obama risks going down in history (the LBJ way)

You aren't really the US president until you've ordered an airstrike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two in his first week in office. But, now that he has been blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he's planning to fight in Afghanistan?
Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the ''bad guy'', whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. It also annoys Pakistan, whose territory the US violated in carrying out the killings.

It's not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn't).

The question is: do these killings serve any useful purpose? And the same question applies to the entire US war in Afghanistan.

Obama may be planning to shut Guantanamo, but the broader concept of a ''war on terror'' is still alive and well in Washington. Most of the people he has appointed to run his defence and foreign policies believe in it, and there is no sign that he himself questions it. Yet even 15 years ago the notion would have been treated with contempt in every military staff college in the country.

That generation of American officers learned two things from their miserable experience in Vietnam. One was that going halfway around the world to fight a conventional military campaign against an ideology (communism then, Islamism now) was a truly stupid idea.

The other was that, no matter how strenuously the other side insists it is motivated by a world-spanning ideology, its real motives are mostly political and quite local (Vietnamese nationalism then, Iraqi and Afghan nationalism now).

Alas, that generation of officers has now retired, and the new generation of strategists, civilian as well as military, has to learn these lessons all over again. They are proving to be slow students, and if Obama follows their advice then Afghanistan may well prove his Vietnam.

The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the US military ''advisers'' whom presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent to South Vietnam from 1956-63. The political job of creating a pro-Western, anti-communist state was entrusted to America's man in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the South Vietnamese army had the job of fighting the communist rebels, the Viet Cong.

Unfortunately, neither Diem nor the South Vietnamese army had much success, and by the early 1960s the Viet Cong were clearly on the road to victory.

So Kennedy authorised a group of South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem (although the US president seemed shocked when they killed him).

And Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy soon afterwards, authorised a rapid expansion of the American troop commitment in Vietnam, first to 200,000 by the end of 1965 and ultimately to half a million by 1968. The US took over the war. Then it lost it.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it's because we are now at a similar juncture in America's war in Afghanistan. The United States' man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, and the Afghan Army he theoretically commands have failed to quell the insurrection and are visibly losing ground.

So the talk in Washington now is all of replacing Karzai (although it will probably be done via elections, which are easily manipulated in Afghanistan), and the US troop commitment in the country is going up to 60,000. Various American allies, Australia among them, also have troops in Afghanistan, just as they did in Vietnam, but it is the US that is taking over the war.

We already know how this story ends. There is not a lot in common between president John F. Kennedy and president George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win and did not need to win.

They then bequeathed those wars to presidents who had ambitious reform agendas in domestic politics and little interest or experience in foreign affairs.

That bequest destroyed Lyndon Johnson, who took the rotten advice of the military and civilian advisers he inherited from Kennedy because there wasn't much else on offer in Washington at the time.

Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the ''war on terror'' could do for him, too.

He has figured out that Iraq was a foolish and unnecessary war, but has not yet applied the same analysis to Afghanistan.

The two questions he needs to ask himself are first: did Osama bin Laden want the United States to invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11? The answer to that one is: yes, of course he did. And second: of all the tens of thousands of people the US has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, would a single one have turned up in the United States to do harm if left un-killed? Answer: probably not.

Other people might have turned up in the US with evil intent, but not those guys.

So turning Afghanistan into a second Vietnam is probably the wrong strategy, isn't it?

Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Australia by Scribe.