Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday that the pivotal US-led military operation on the Taliban's southern Afghan stronghold will "not destroy Kandahar in the effort to save Kandahar."

Seated next to Afghan President Hamid Karzai during his visit to Washington, Clinton said US commanders have learned the lessons of waging a counterinsurgency in Iraq and will seek to return a functioning Afghan city to the people who live there.

"They want to have a successful counterinsurgency operation that doesn't destroy Kandahar in the effort to save Kandahar," the chief US diplomat said during a discussion at the US Institute of Peace.

"This is not Fallujah," she said referring to the bloody, large-scale US Marine offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004.

"Lessons have been learned since Iraq," Clinton said.

"People who are guiding this operation, General (David) Petraeus and General (Stanley) McChrystal, learned those lessons in Iraq," she said.

"I want the American press particularly to be disabused that somehow you are going to wake up one morning and D-Day has started. This is not what this is about. This is not what counterinsurgency is about," Clinton said.

Her words on Kandahar echoed a statement attributed to an unnamed US officer in Vietnam in 1968 after a fierce battle in the Mekong Delta town of Ben Tre, in which he said "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

The line became one of the most famous quotes from the war, symbolizing to many the failure of the US military in Vietnam despite overwhelming US firepower.

"We're not fighting the Afghan people," Clinton stressed about the Kandahar operation.

"We're fighting a small minority of very dedicated, ruthless extremists who unfortunately are able to enlist young men… for a variety of reasons and send them out onto the battlefield."

She said the goal of the operation is "to help the people of Kandahar to recover the entire city to be able to put it to the use and the benefit of the people of Kandahar."

US commanders view Kandahar, the capital of the 1996-2001 Taliban regime, as a make-or-break battleground for turning around the war before the scheduled start of a gradual drawdown of American forces in July 2011.

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