During the campaign of 2008, Barack Obama was considered the new Jack Kennedy, the inheritor of the Camelot gene. JFK's brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, said as much and was an early backer of the current president.

Later, when the thoughtful, serious President Obama ran into a buzzsaw of Republican opposition and round-the-clock right-wing assault, he began to look like an overwhelmed Jimmy Carter just before his presidency was terminated by Ronald Reagan and his own inability to appear decisive. Obviously, this is a scenario Republicans soon heartily embraced.

Today, though, President Obama more resembles Lyndon Baines Johnson as that president agonized whether to escalate, or de-escalate, the war in Vietnam. Most people today would say that President Johnson made the wrong choice in 1965 when he listened to those advisers who clammored for American combat troops.

What will the future say of President Obama's pressing decision regarding Afghanistan? Much has changed since those Cold War days, in which every decision had to factor in the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as well as China's massive armies in Southeast Asia. Yet decisions regarding war and its escalation are just as urgent today, as troops from Vermont National Guard Troop B -- about to deploy to Afghanistan -- and their families well understand.

President Obama seemed set on an aggressive policy of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, before recent successes

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by the insurgents against the U.S. and its allies and the mounting cost of the war, in terms of dollars and lives lost or destroyed. Suddenly, there is an open public debate over what the U.S. should do next.

General Stanley McChrystal called Thursday for a dramatic change in tactics against the Taliban insurgents, who not only operate in difficult mountain terrain but hide on the Pakistan side of the border between the two nations and obviously have a troubling amount of support inside the Pakistan government itself. That U.S. ally has been less than enthusiastic in pursuing Taliban camps in their country and resents it when we launch attacks or air strikes there.

This is much like the situation in South Vietnam, our corrupt government ally in that war, and the several borders the U.S. military could not cross in pursuit of North Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldiers who attacked in the south. We no longer fear a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, but we do fear destabilizing the government in Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons that might fall into the hands of the Taliban or other groups.

All of this points to what we should not do in Afghanistan, which is to allow -- as we did in Vietnam -- American soldiers to remain indefinitely as targets for the enemy, while the people ostensibly in charge in the nation we are helping generally watch from the sidelines. This means avoiding just what General McChrystal advocated this week:

"We don't win by destroying the Taliban," the general said, adding that stabilizing the new government in Afghanistan and winning over the people should be our goal -- one for which he reportedly is seeking an additional 40,000 U.S. troops.

Anyone who has ever heard the phrases "pacification" or "we destroyed the village in order to save it," or "winning their hearts and minds" should be leery of the commander's tone and apparent meaning. Maybe a focus on destroying the Taliban whenever they leave their camps should be our goal, but that patrolling the countryside and providing security should be the responsibility of those who have the most to gain -- and the most to lose -- from a Taliban revival in Afghanistan.