By 2014, the Afghan war being fought by the United States in collaboration with Canada, Australia, Japan and several other European nations had already become the longest military involvement in American history, and during its second phase rather assumed the uncharitable title of ‘Obama's war’. For many critics, it may be the third Vietnam in recent history following the earlier United States-Vietnam conflagration and the Soviet entanglement in Afghanistan in the 1980s – often called Moscow's Vietnam by many observers, including Zbigniew Brzezinski. In fact, by 2013 a continuously restive Afghanistan had already become the biggest security challenge to the United States with its serious and ever-expansive implications for Southwest Asian nations such as Pakistan and beyond. The former National Security Advisor, in his inaugural lecture at a conference in Dallas in 2009, had vocally highlighted the dangers of Washington's ongoing policies in a country where people were fiercely independent and religiously motivated, and given their terrain and past history determined to fight foreign forces on their soil.