From the book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (1972):
"President Kennedy first began to have doubts about our military effort in Vietnam in 1961 when both General Douglas MacArthur and General Charles de Gaulle warned him that the Asian mainland was no place to be fighting a non-nuclear land war. There was no end to Asian manpower, MacArthur told the President, and even if we poured a million American infantry soldiers into that continent, we would still find ourselves outnumbered on every side. De Gaulle said the same thing in Paris that spring, pointing out that the French had shown us the hopelessness of trying to fight in that country ...
"Later the President invited the general to the White House for lunch and they talked for more than two hours, ruining my [Kenneth P. O'Donnell] appointments schedule for that day. I could not drag them apart. The President later gave us a rundown of MacArthur's remarks. He was extremely critical of the military advice that the President was getting from the Pentagon, blaming it on the military leadership of the previous ten years which, he said, had advanced the wrong officers. 'You were lucky to have that mistake happen in a place like Cuba, where the strategic cost was not too great,' he said about the Bay of Pigs, and urged the President not to listen too carefully to advisors who favored a military buildup in Vietnam."
"The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is a landlocked country in South-Central Asia." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan
Maybe there's a connection between the attempts to conquer Moscow in 1941, and North Korea in 1950 (which MacArthur was involved in); the attempt to conquer Stalingrad in 1942, and the Vietnam war; and, between the Battle of the Bulge (1944) and the current US war in the "graveyard of empires" (http://davecoop.net/patterns).
Rudyard Kipling:
The Naulahka
Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hassle the Aryan
brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the
Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of
the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hassle the
East."
The Young British Soldier
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.