Verified UGC via AP
Hundreds of people run alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moves down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 16, 2021.
Two weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975, the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee arrived at the White House for an unprecedented meeting with President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger on the new war appropriations and the rapidly deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. With the North Vietnamese army closing in on the capital, the senators demanded that the administration speed up the evacuations of the remaining Americans. That decision meant leaving about 175,000 South Vietnamese in the gravest danger behind. Frank Church of Idaho feared that committing more funds to a large-scale evacuation was a recipe for a wider war, while New York’s Jacob Javits supported “large sums” limited to an evacuation-only approach for Americans and “deserving South Vietnamese.”
Joe Biden agreed. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out,” said the freshman Delaware senator. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”
On the final day of the American occupation of South Vietnam, American officials had only evacuated a minuscule fraction of their imperiled allies. One group of petrified Vietnamese at the CIA’s hotel residence believed the CIA officials, who told them to go to their homes, where they would be picked up. The transportation never arrived. When the Vietnamese remaining in the embassy tried to follow the last contingent of Marines sprinting to the roof to a waiting helicopter, the Marines pelted them with tear gas. North Vietnam had begun its final offensive, pushing through the center of the country, on March 10. Just six weeks later, on April 30, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon.
American policymakers also misjudged how fast Kabul would fall to the Taliban. Desperate Afghans also ran alongside, in front, and under an American aircraft, this time an immense U.S. Air Force cargo plane departing from the international airport. Others climbed up and held on after takeoff. They plunged to their deaths, recalling in one searing image both the Saigon debacle and the grisly scenes of Americans flinging themselves from the burning World Trade Center towers.
The U.S. sidestepped the cultural and military lessons of Vietnam in its quest to contain terrorism by imposing a democratic republic in a place with no democratic traditions.
Supposedly inferior Taliban fighters have chewed up and spit out two decades’ worth of nation building and modernization efforts—again—by exploiting the catastrophic ignorance that Americans seem to produce in limitless quantities. Committed bands of insurgents beat back—again—one of the world’s most advanced armies. Dismissing the Vietnam parallels as so much ahistorical trash talk, as Biden did in July, fails to engage with the rich evidence to the contrary that presaged the ignoble exit from Afghanistan.
George H.W. Bush claimed that the United States kicked the Vietnam syndrome after the first Gulf War, the strategically limited conflict that set the U.S. on a course for protracted involvement in Afghanistan. The U.S., like Britain and Russia before it, has been undone by the intractable complexities of the region. The U.S. sidestepped the cultural and military lessons of Vietnam in its quest to contain terrorism by imposing a democratic republic in a place with no democratic traditions, one dominated by tribes and warlords who disdained the American-installed leaders in Kabul.
But this time, this time, would be different. There was more money, more seasoned experts, more advanced weaponry, many fewer casualties, minimal stateside resistance, and a malleable Congress. Yet, with more of everything, American goals were muddled as they were a generation ago. Frances FitzGerald noted in her seminal work Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam:
[The United States] was entering into a moral and ideological struggle over the form of the state and the goals of the society. Its success with its chosen contender would depend not merely on U.S. military power but on the resources of both the United States and the Saigon government to solve Vietnamese domestic problems in a manner acceptable to the Vietnamese. But what indeed were Vietnamese problems, and did they even exist in the terms in which Americans conceived them? The unknowns made the whole enterprise, from the most rational and tough-minded point of view, risky in the extreme.
And so, Americans arrived in Afghanistan unable to engage with an ultraconservative, rural Islamic society bound by centuries-old, little-changed cultural practices. The political culture hinged not on an ill-equipped central government, but on tribal loyalties, grudges, corruption, and favoritism. In Saigon, the background music for all of this dysfunction was rock and roll; in Kabul, it was gangsta rap.
In 2007, national-security researchers Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason wrote: “In short, the United States is losing the war in Afghanistan one Pashtun village at a time, bursting into schoolyards full of children with guns bristling, kicking in village doors, searching women, speeding down city streets, and putting out cross-cultural gibberish in totally ineffectual InfoOps and PsyOps campaigns—all of which are anathema to the Afghans.”
Five years later, the Afghan Defense Ministry took up a project, the publication of a short booklet. The aim of “Cultural Understanding—A Guide to Understanding Coalition Cultures” was to explain that Americans and coalition forces meant no harm when they inquired after a man’s wife or daughter. “If a coalition soldier asks you about your family members, including your wife or daughter, do not take this as an offense or an attempt to humiliate you,” the booklet instructed. “They only want to have friendly relations with you. Instead of taking offense, you should tell them that Afghans do not discuss their female family members with others.”
“A complete change in counterinsurgency strategy is required,” Johnson and Mason concluded, “and all U.S. soldiers must become cultural and language warriors with months, not minutes, of training in both language and culture before deployment.”
The Taliban, like the North Vietnamese before them, could wait for the Americans to tire of the cultural challenges and the fighting. U.S. airpower minimized American casualties on the ground, and the Taliban did not face the kind of bombing campaigns that American forces unleashed against the North Vietnamese. Dropping more bombs on the country than it did in Europe and Asia during World War II did not work then and was out of the question now.
The Afghan forces suffered many of the same deficits as the South Vietnamese troops and never cohered into an effective fighting force. The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock noted that “U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters.” No surprise then that as U.S. forces fell back, Afghan forces crumpled before the Taliban. After the chaotic exit, the Taliban seized Bagram Air Base and a motherlode of biometric data, weapons, vehicles, and other materiel en route to Kabul.
President Biden and the Pentagon bear responsibility for the final exit madness, but this war is scarcely his to shoulder alone.
George W. Bush and Barack Obama used the search for Osama bin Laden as a stateside rallying cry. As the years ticked off, however, neither the war nor his death roused the same emotions as Vietnam. That was, of course, by design, to minimize the turmoil that Vietnam provoked. There was no drama from the all-volunteer Army and the reserve forces doing the fighting. Afghanistan did not cleave American society into factions of hawks and peaceniks. There were many fewer anti-war marches. Nonstop war coverage was a relic of American journalism’s past. Congress preferred to immerse itself in petty partisanship battles. Even the Post’s publication of The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, a catalog of the Vietnam syndrome at work, with bleak assessments of the war, falsified reports of progress, and the failure to adapt to the Afghan context, did not dent America’s conscience like the Pentagon Papers did.
Afghanistan is the last gasp of the generation of policymakers who came of age during the Vietnam War. Biden and the Pentagon bear responsibility for the final exit madness, but this war is scarcely his to shoulder alone, and this president appears less disposed to countenance further intervention in the region. The Republicans have already begun to twist the narrative to completely ensnare President Biden and the Democrats in the entirety of the Afghan debacle, while absolving the Bushes for getting the U.S. in, or Donald Trump and themselves for their role in negotiating the end to the war, planning for the exit, and the inevitable refugee crisis. What, if any, lessons will the U.S. learn this time?
Yet the American people have long since disengaged from Afghanistan. For the past 20 years, most of us have gazed at our navels, ignored the lives lost, and mumbled, “Thank you for your service” on cue. As the pus of Vietnam seeps out of the wounds reopened by another spectacular misapplication of American power, the pandemic will reorient the country back to the peculiar traumas of this time—vaccinations, race and history, insurrectionists, climate nightmares—and away from any serious and lasting accounting of another set of grotesque political, military, and humanitarian failures.
