The recent chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has given a sense of already seen about that.
Those who remember the fall of Saigon in 1975 have no doubt seen the connection with the Afghan situation; a city under attack and the Americans and their allies trying to get out in a mad rush.
In 1975, the CIA and other intelligence agencies believed that Saigon would not fall for several months; it fell in a few weeks, just like Kabul.
There was a Vietnam debate in 1975 on how to evacuate American citizens and their allies, a debate we also saw with Afghanistan; who should go, who should stay?
And then there was the airlift. In 1975, there was the dramatic helicopter evacuation of the roof of the American Embassy; in August 2021, it is the flights from Kabul and the thousands of people who try to board a plane.
And in both cases, there was a lack of American troops to secure the area so that an evacuation could be carried out with less chaos.
It all says this: American leaders never seem to learn from the mistakes of the past; they do them over and over again.
I do not know why the American military leaders did not fly in troops to better secure the Kabul airport. Despite some officials claiming that the Americans were caught off guard by the Taliban’s rapid takeover, those in a position to know tell me that every American commander knew that the Afghan army was weak and would quickly fall into the hands of the Taliban.
So why haven’t we done more to ensure a more orderly withdrawal?
We may never know the answer to that. Chaos quickly became a political sword as a way for Republicans to hurt Democrats.
In 1975, it was a Republican president who oversaw the fall of Saigon and the chaos that followed; today, a Democratic president has overseen the chaos in Kabul.
Ineptitude has no festive label.
As you will recall, America’s ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan also began in chaos.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001 – we just celebrated the 20th anniversary of that tragic day last weekend – Americans united in retaliating against those who aided Islamist militants.
And we did, ultimately tracking down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and killing him.
But at what cost ? Billions of dollars spent, thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan – what for?
What has America gained in Afghanistan after 20 years of lost lives?
About as much as we did in Vietnam and Iraq, that is, all three were misguided and unfortunate military enterprises driven by American pride.
We Americans like to think that we can impose our cultural, social and political values ​​on other nations. We want to believe that our military might can do more than just wage war, that it can be used for “nation building”.
But it is impossible to help a nation build a civic culture in the midst of its own civil war, which defines both Vietnam and Afghanistan.
In the short term, US forces have done good things in both countries. But it was only through the military presence and the use of violence that we were able to do this.
Ultimately, both countries returned to their own version of the Dark Ages after the departure of the US military.
So have we really accomplished anything, or have we just delayed the inevitable?
Maybe chaos was inevitable.
Obama tried to get out of Afghanistan. Trump tried.
Maybe they delayed because of the chaos that was about to unfold. Sometimes doing nothing is a strategy.
We entered with good intentions, but we couldn’t stay there forever. We lost the war the day we started it. There would never be a good result, only a less bad one.
However, it is haunting to think that so many American lives have been lost there with seemingly nothing accomplished.
Many Americans have died in Vietnam to no avail. In Iraq. Now Afghanistan.
