Afghanistan = Vietnam 2.0

The war on terror going on in Afghanistan has more or less become my generation's Vietnam War. First, there's the obvious comparisons of the protests (although in Afghanistan's case, that seems to have died down as the years progressed) and the improvement in news reporting. Some may associate the "No Blood For Oil" protesting with Iraq, but it started with Afghanistan before any officials even hinted at going into Iraq. Today, in the NYT, two articles about the armed conflict in Afghanistan were (perhaps unintentionally) juxtaposed with one another on the same page, basically sending the message that the American military was going to leave Afghanistan in the same horrific condition as Vietnam. In one article, Defense Secretary Panetta swears that the American military will no longer be in a combative mode in Afghanistan by the summer of 2013. On the other half of the page is a continuation of an article talking about how the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan, which the reporter is treating as a far-gone conclusion that nothing has changed in Afghanistan and that the United States might as well have never done anything in a military sense to respond to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. So America will wash its hands of Afghanistan relatively soon and leave it to be a bloody and confused mess, just as America did with Vietnam. However, here, the invasion wasn't just a power struggle with the USSR and the shadow threat of Communism that never really came to fruition, but rather an attempt to retaliate for and prevent terrorist attacks that are a known evil and have created devastation that everyone has witnessed.

Should the United States allow for Afghanistan to really become Vietnam 2.0 and let the Taliban, which fostered Al Qaeda (responsible for, among other things, 9/11, 7/7, and the Madrid train bombings), become the new bogeyman, far surpassing the USSR in the ability to terrify the masses because it has proven to be deadly and will take action (this isn't another cold war, but a very hot one)?

Part of me feels frustrated at the prospect because I do not want my potential future offspring to ever live in a world where it's normal for people to try to blow up airplanes or use them as weapons and that's why we have to do full-body scans at airport security check points (note that even after the hostage crises and the Lockerbie bombing, there still were not extensive security screening measures in place). Or where it's common to not be allowed to visit anything of national significance because of the fear that it might be a target of a terrorist attack (thinking back to the months following 9/11 when so many places were shut down or blocked off out of fear that too many people would congregate there or it was seen as too identifiable and thus would be an ideal terrorist target). When WWII ended, people stopped having to practice blackouts and air raids and carry around gas masks. If the US pulls out of Afghanistan soon, I doubt that we will no longer have to do full body scans at airports or that the fear of a successful bombing of Times Square will disappear within a year or two. Why? Because, quite simply, we will have "lost" the War on Terror by simply giving up instead of seeing it through to the end.