Has Afghanistan turned into Barack Obama’s Vietnam?

It could, but it hasn’t yet. At this point, there are still crucial differences between the two wars, including:

• Support at home. The American public’s support for the war has certainly declined, but eight years after 9/11, enthusiasm for its original goal of destroying Al Qaeda remains strong.

• A smaller, more targeted fighting force. More than 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1969; more than 58,000 died in the course of the war. U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan will reach 68,000 later this year; as of last week, 562 had been killed in action — about one-hundredth the toll of the Vietnam War.

• Honest military assessments. In Vietnam, U.S. commanders sugarcoated their analysis for the folks back home. In Afghanistan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, recently called the situation “serious and deteriorating.” And Mullen, who began his career as a Navy officer in Vietnam, makes a point of promising no quick victory. “By no means do I think we can turn [Afghanistan] around in 12 to 18 months, but I think we can start,” he told me last week.

Still, on at least one important count, Afghanistan does resemble Vietnam: Its central government is both incompetent and deeply corrupt, and that could sink the war effort.

How bad is it? Transparency International, an independent group that measures corruption around the world, ranks Afghanistan as one of the world’s five worst governments, 176th out of 180.

Afghans report that police officers, judges, and other officials routinely shake them down for bribes.

The one option that won’t work, Obama’s advisers believe, is withdrawal. “There’s no way to defeat Al Qaeda, which is the mission, with just that approach,” Mullen said. “You can’t do it remotely.”

To learn whether the war is even winnable, and to avoid seeing it turn into another Vietnam, Obama needs to do two things. He needs to rally public and congressional support behind another troop increase; that, oddly enough, will be the easy part. And he needs to find ways to make Afghanistan’s government work, by ramping up the civilian surge and getting aid directly to local leaders who deliver services to their constituents — even if, in some cases, they aren’t as clean as we’d like. That will be the hard part.

A year or more from now, we will still be debating whether Afghanistan is turning into Obama’s Vietnam. If the president is lucky, the question will still be open.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A version of this commentary was published on Sept. 8.