VIETNAM REPLAYED? President Obama's plan to send more troops to Afghanistan and Pakistan sends a signal to the anti-war activists who supported him in the election that he meant what he said during the 2008 Presidential Campaign. Nothing could be clearer: he intended, if elected, to escalate the war in Afghanistan and to support the nuclear armed regime in Pakistan with economic and military aid. In 1962, President Kennedy took up the failing cause of French imperialism in Vietnam. In 1967, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed a resolution in response to an entirely bogus incident in the Tonkin Gulf--foreshadowing the manufactured "WMD" excuse used by George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

Today, a bipartisan majority in Congress supports Obama's war in Afghanistan. Will Pakistan become a replay of the catastrophic Vietnam intervention, drowning the Obama Administration--and America--in a quagmire from which there is no exit, possibly leading to wider war? What should anti-war progressives do?

Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, a freelance medical writer, and a lecturer in journalism at UC Santa Cruz.

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