Analogical comparisons between the American experience in Vietnam and in Afghanistan are rife in the media, but it remains unclear how effective analogical reasoning is in understanding the contemporary challenges in Afghanistan. The literature illustrates that while analogies can be helpful in understanding problems initially, adherence to stark analogical reasoning often blocks a fuller understanding of a complex problem that generally differs when one goes beyond superficial analysis. Thus analogical arguments that Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam or that Afghanistan is just like Vietnam contribute little to our understanding of the challenges faced today by U.S. and NATO forces. This article looks at the contemporary application of the Vietnam analogy to Afghanistan and its utility in understanding contemporary security challenges.

There is an inevitable tension between the need to create conditions of stability through peace-building interventions and longer-term developmental needs. These tensions include focusing immediate attention and spending on local militaries, militias, and powerbrokers, for example, rather than on longer-term governance imperatives and the foundations for sustainable job creation, or put alternatively, on short-term humanitarian assistance (often involving the delivery of food) rather than development. Three central questions emerge: Should we balance the powerbroker versus good governance imperative and if so, how? How can we get the politics right—or better? How can foreign interventions best assist private sector growth? Dealing with this “stabilization dilemma” is problematic and involves political trade-offs, yet is not only possible but necessary. This is a special quandary for donors and other external agents as they seek to change the incentive structure that contributed to conflict in the first instance.

A vast military-logistical landscape is forming as a result of force protection policies and long-term U.S. engagement in distant theaters of operation around the world. Facilitated by shifts in technology (aerospace, unmanning), policy (LOGCAP and BRAC) and strategy (preemptive action, force protection) since the Cold War, the spatial infrastructure of the U.S military has witnessed an unprecedented transformation both at home, and abroad. Responding to the geopolitical dynamics of national boundaries and assymetric nature of urban warfare, engagement by the U.S. military has responded in-kind with transmodal, transoceanic and transcontinental infrastructure of considerable physical scale and scope. This article chronicles the geospatial extents and effects of this expansion by looking at the formation of logistics islands and the adverse effects of the global defense supply chains which connect them.