As of today, June 7, 2010, the war in Afghanistan has lasted 104 months, surpassing Vietnam as the longest war in American history. American forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, Kabul fell that November, and America’s attention shifted to the war in Iraq. It wasn’t until after the 2007 troop surge in Iraq and, after that, the 2008 election that America refocused its attention on Afghanistan, but our troops were there all along. In December 2009, President Obama committed another 30,000 troops to the region. Critics and pundits have not been shy about comparing the conflict to the one in Vietnam, and Gordon Goldstein’s book Lessons in Disaster, about President Kennedy and Johnson’s national security decisions leading up to the Americanization of the Vietnam War, was circulated around the White House as they formulated their new strategy in Afghanistan. A touchstone of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is the drawing down of troops come summer 2011. By that time, the war will be 116 months old—a record, we can only hope, that will remain in the books for many years to come.

UPDATE: The war in Afghanistan is longer than the Vietnam War, only if you consider the start of the Vietnam War the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Richard Holbrooke, who spent time as a diplomat in Vietnam from 1962 to 1969 and is currently President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, spoke with NPR’s Robert Siegel and had this to offer:

You want to tell that to the families of the people whose names are on the Vietnam War Memorial? The first names are from 1961, if I'm not mistaken. And the last are after 1973. And I think we should respect the sacrifice and risk everyone took in Vietnam.

Be that as it may (Afghanistan) is clearly the second longest war in American history. That's clear. That's something I personally predicted in columns in the Washington Post.

... Let me be very clear. I have always felt that the war in Afghanistan would be one of, if not, the longest war in American history. And I wrote that in the Washington Post in a column before I came into the government.

Having said that, it is not longer than the Vietnam War yet. And I hope it won't be. And it is simply a misstatement of history, an arbitrary trick to pretend it is.

The difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan, and I'm the only person I think who's had extensive experience in both, who's so deeply involved, is that Vietnam was not directly related to our national security interest in the way Afghanistan is. We're there because of 9/11. And that's a simple matter of fact.

READ MORE:

• Sebastian Junger’s dispatches from the Korengal Valley: “Into the Valley of Death” and “Return to the Valley of Death”

• Afghanistan vs. Vietnam War Rages on in the Media