I HAVE a distinct memory of sitting at my dear friend Duc’s cafe-cum-gallery in Hanoi watching CNN discuss Barack Obama’s foreign policy right after he became president in 2009. All the pundits were asking whether ‘Afghanistan would become his Vietnam’.

Those of us at the cafe, including young Vietnamese, did a double-take. The 20-year American war (as it is called in Vietnam) ended in 1975, and in the 30 or so years since, the country had transformed from being one of the poorest in the world to “an economic miracle” as described by the World Economic Forum. The reference to the war had different meanings to my friends: for older friends, it was a reminder about the terrible suffering their families faced, while the younger generation — born after the government introduced ‘doi moi’, economic and political reforms in 1986 — did not have a connection to that war, outside school lessons, state narratives, war museum visits etc.

The American media, however, seemed obsessed with making those comparisons. Afghanistan would become America’s longest war shortly after Obama took charge, beating the one in Vietnam, in which 58,000 Americans died. I understood the comparisons back then: support for the war in Vietnam was so low that historians........

© Dawn