Because those are the most directly relevant to the conflict. Service members dying in accidents or by suicide still happens at home, sometimes at even higher rates than it happens on deployment.
> And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As you’ve noticed, I’m not an advocate of losing wars, especially not by means of unilateral surrender. The Afghanistan withdrawal was not a military decision because the military does not have the authority to make that decision. It was a political decision.
> China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
This explanation does not fit the facts. It is inconsistent with the failure of the Tet Offensive to inspire a large scale popular uprising in South Vietnam; it failed in this objective because the people of South Vietnam were not, for the most part, sympathetic to the communists. It also doesn’t explain the vast scale and utter desperation of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communists as they overran the south of Vietnam. If the people of Vietnam wanted communist rule, why were they so desperate to escape it?
Looking at total deaths is only fair, because different situations are going to cause different attrition rates, including non-combat. Put another way, the non-combat death rate of those deployed in Afghanistan is going to be different than that for those on base at Pendleton. This is why, for instance, vaccine experiments compare all-cause mortality between the control and experiment groups.
Whether one is a fan of losing a war, or not, matters not - when you can't win. The Afghanistan Papers were the military's own assessment. We were losing, and running out of Afghans. If you wanted to keep the war going then soon enough you'd start needing large numbers of American soldiers maintaining ground ops, and that's basically not possible - we'd be getting picked off like fish in a barrel. The politicians certainly knew the Afghan security forces would collapse. The idea was probably to try to paint it as a failure of those security forces, instead of a failure of America - as would happen if we started mass deployment, and then ended up having to retreat anyhow - minimizing humiliation.
As for Vietnam, the number of initial refugees was quite low - hundreds of thousands in a country of tens of millions. And the earliest refugees were largely made up of collaborators who had every reasonable expectation of facing torture and death if they remained. It also says very little about ideology as China was one of the destinations for hundreds of thousands of the early refugees.
This fact is not disputed by anyone. You can read the US reports on the resettlement here [1]. Wiki being Wiki sites a YouTube video from the Navy, but concludes the same [2]:
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"The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon to the People's Army of Vietnam and the subsequent evacuation of more than 130,000 Vietnamese closely associated with the United States or the former government of South Vietnam...
After the Saigon evacuation, the number of Vietnamese leaving their country remained relatively small until mid-1978. A number of factors contributed to the refugee crisis, including economic hardship and wars in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. In addition, up to 300,000 people, especially those associated with the former government and military of South Vietnam, were sent to re-education camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor."
Because those are the most directly relevant to the conflict. Service members dying in accidents or by suicide still happens at home, sometimes at even higher rates than it happens on deployment.
> And, again, it's also an endless money sink. We wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan and achieved less than nothing.
As you’ve noticed, I’m not an advocate of losing wars, especially not by means of unilateral surrender. The Afghanistan withdrawal was not a military decision because the military does not have the authority to make that decision. It was a political decision.
> China and the USSR supported the Vietnamese forces, but those forces were already "naturally" aligned. By contrast the South Vietnamese government was just a an inorganic puppet government.
This explanation does not fit the facts. It is inconsistent with the failure of the Tet Offensive to inspire a large scale popular uprising in South Vietnam; it failed in this objective because the people of South Vietnam were not, for the most part, sympathetic to the communists. It also doesn’t explain the vast scale and utter desperation of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communists as they overran the south of Vietnam. If the people of Vietnam wanted communist rule, why were they so desperate to escape it?