"The long war in Afghanistan has left Britain wary of more major military engagements abroad, much as Vietnam sapped America's will to fight," the British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said Friday during a trip to Afghanistan.
War-weary Britain is experiencing its own "Vietnam phenomenon" as the Afghan mission draws to a close, the Defence Secretary told The Telegraph.
The British Defence Secretary admitted that the length and cost of the Afghan conflict has reduced Britain's willingness to conduct major military interventions in future.
"I suspect that the British people - and not just the British people - will be wary of enduring engagements on this kind of scale for perhaps quite a long while in the future," he said.
In a striking reference, he invoked the memory of the US intervention in Vietnam, which spanned three decades and ended in 1975 with a humiliating American retreat.
Speaking at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand province, Mr. Hammond said, "You might call it the Vietnam phenomenon - when an engagement turns out to be longer and more costly than originally envisaged, there is often a public reaction to that."
But can the war in Afghanistan be compared with the Vietnam War?
"It is correct that the Afghan war like any other war has continued for a long time, but the two wars are different. Afghanistan's war is an 'anti-insurgency war'," Ahmad Behzad, member of the Afghan Parliament told TOLOnews.
The UK has around 8,045 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and most of them are based in the southern Helmand province.
They have lost around 444 soldiers in the Afghan war, since 2001.
The foreign troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and hand-over full security responsibilities to the Afghan forces.