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Iranian foreign minister Ali Larijani cited recent American actions in Afghanistan as similar to mistakes that the United States made in Vietnam decades earlier. Larijani also noted the former Soviet Union's failure to achieve its goals in Afghanistan in the 1980s as well as evidence that foreigners cannot win wars in Afghanistan.

You would expect nothing less from a senior Iranian official, but he has a point, one that many observers and analysts have been trying to make since President Barack Obama changed American policy and strategy in Afghanistan to one that has almost no chance of success. The combination of an ill-defined mission and the wrong strategy to achieve it, combined with the refusal to adequately resource the deployed forces is a recipe for disaster. What the President is doing in South Asia could be the template for a Foreign Policy Failures for Dummies book.