With its disintegrating police forces and exhausted troops of questionable loyalty, Afghanistan today was the distinct stench of the last months and years of South Vietnam. It’s hard to accept this. There are many reasons why we should not welcome the Taliban’s coming victory. But we need to accept that it’s ultimately the central government’s corruption, incompetence, and inability to provide security or command respect that dooms it to oblivion.
We’ve been there for twenty years. We could stay for five more, or ten, and perhaps put off the final day of reckoning. But there’s nothing obvious we could do that we haven’t already tried that would change the ultimate outcome.
There are, however, some important differences between Afghanistan and South Vietnam. The threat presented by the communist takeover of South Vietnam was speculative or theoretical. In retrospect, fighting the war was far more damaging than anything that resulted from losing it or that would likely have occurred if we had never decided to wage it in the first place.
By contrast, after the attacks of 9/11, we clearly needed to do something about the threat emanating from Afghanistan. If the Taliban take over the country again, we will need to be vigilant that Afghanistan doesn’t again become a lawless training ground for anti-American terrorists. We don’t exactly have good friends in the region who are willing and able to help us with that task. But perhaps that’s a reason to work on those relationships, as difficult as that might be.
What we have been doing is not working and is not going to work. We’ll always reserve the right to protect ourselves, even preemptively in certain circumstances. And the Taliban doesn’t have the same kind of internal legitimacy that our North Vietnamese foes enjoyed. Most Afghans don’t want to be bullied by religious fanatics and don’t see the Taliban as heroic nationalist liberators. No one deserves this fate, but we have failed to stop it.
There are still some things we can do to mitigate this disaster, but we cannot fix Afghanistan and we need to stop pretending that we can.
My brother was in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan for two tours prior to the Russian invasion that led to so many decades of misery. He returned after the liberation to find a country full of hope for the possibility of a return to something decent they vaguely remembered. Culture returned, balloons flown, and then W turned things over to warlords so he could have his Iraq adventure. There are many reasons why things fell apart, but W’s failures are high on the list. My brother reconnected to friends who had fled into Iran and were finally able to return.… Read more »
How can President Biden frame a withdrawal/cessation along the lines of what you suggest but so as to minimize the harm from the hue and cry from those on the Right saying we are weak!?
Why does it need to be a withdrawal or a complete withdrawal? By now we should own some of that POS.
It kinda sticks in my craw that Trump arranged for us to get out by May.
It was always Vietnam II… anyone who thought differently was not paying attention.
i worked on research into computer based military training for many years. When 9/11 happened we started pivoting in all sorts of new directions and eventually landed on teaching foreign language combined with gaming. We eventually spun out that product into a company which sold a language and culture training solution to the military and then adapted the product for the civilian market as well. From my perspective though we were always not teaching the right things or at least not focusing on the right outcome. While we developed the product I read a story about a young officer in… Read more »
That took a little longer to track down than I’d intended… U.S. soldier named honorary sheik in recognition of efforts to help Iraqis Horn, 25, a native of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., acknowledges he had little interest in the region before coming here. But a local sheik friendly to U.S. forces, Dr. Mohammed Ismail Ahmed, explained the inner workings of rural Iraqi society on one of Horn’s first Humvee patrols.Horn says he was intrigued, and started making a point of stopping by all the villages, all but one dominated by Sunni Arabs, to talk to people about their life and… Read more »
“But there’s nothing obvious we could do that we haven’t already tried.” One possibility, if we need an arguably dignified way out of Afghanistan, is to elevate Afghan Army pay so that it makes sense for enlisted troops to stick with it, as well as for Taliban foot-soldiers to gravitate to a better-paying gig. Not an easy sell for Biden and his team, but it would cost no more than our current expenditures, while bringing an end to our presence. Each American soldier costs roughly $1 million, annually, to equip, support and deploy there, so $2.5 billion. An Afghan soldier… Read more »