Repeated mistakes, unparalleled futility - Afghanistan returns to Taliban rule.
For those of us that witnessed 9-11 as grade school students, the result of the Afghan withdrawal is a tremendous insult. It also may be worse than its precedents.
As a high schooler one of my favourite reading materials was a multi-volume history of the Vietnam War that covered its roots in post-war French Indochina all the way to the Fall of Saigon. I would read aspects of the same battles and deployments from the viewpoints of participants on all different sides. I somehow doubt that the retelling of the Afghan War will be accomplished with the same nuance. However, there are already comparisons being drawn between the 1975 US rescue of its personnel from the US Embassy in Saigon and the one still occurring in Kabul. It has to be acknowledged empirically that the American failure in 2021 was much more serious and humiliating than in Vietnam, or for that matter the fall of Soviet-backed Afghanistan in 1991.
A much longer analysis could be made to prove this, but it can be summarized in a number of key factors:
Purpose: The US war effort in Vietnam that technically began in 1955 was part of the broader Cold War and meant to prevent the domination of Southeast Asia by communism after the recent fall of China. The main failure there was that South Vietnam was a state carved out based on artificial borders. It is remarkable that it lasted as long as it did.
In Afghanistan, both the Soviets and the Americans entered ostensibly with an eye to reforming an already existing nation and bringing it into the modern era. The Soviets were trying to shore up a floundering communist regime while the US aimed to displace an Islamic theocracy with a pro-Western democracy. Both attempts were doomed due to the arrogance of thinking that a fractured and tribal society could be reordered by outsiders.
Price: As the Taliban advanced President Joe Biden reassured Americans that 300 thousand Afghan troops would stop the assault on Kabul and defend the gains of America’s twenty year adventure there. In 2019 the US was estimated to have invested $2 trillion. Its allied International Security Assistance Force lost a total of 3,562 soldiers, among them 2,420 Americans. There were also almost 4,000 civilian contractors of various nationalities killed. More than 22,000 allied troops were wounded, of them almost 20,000 being Americans. In Vietnam more than 58,000 Americans died and over 300 thousand were wounded. An estimated $950 billion in 2011 dollars were invested there. The Soviets lost almost 15,000 troops and personnel in Afghanistan.
Do these numbers tell the full story? Foreign interventions in conflicts often have to also be assessed by the affect they had on the deterrence effect of the nation undertaking them. In each of these conflicts the major power involved lost a great deal of prestige along with the human, environmental, and material costs. The Soviet-Afghan War led to 5 million external refugees and 2 million internally displaced persons.
Pace: Soon after the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War there were intermittent skirmishes between North and South Vietnamese forces. What broke the back of the South was that they never totally eliminated communist control of supply routes to their forces in the South, such that a massive buildup of North Vietnamese was arrayed and ready to overwhelm them in what became known as the Spring Offensive of 1975. Yet forces of the southern Army, the ARVN, fought doggedly and were able to drag out the fight for five months before Saigon fell. As for communist Afghanistan, it too held out for two years after the Soviet withdrawal before the Mujahideen marched into Kabul.
In both of the prior cases the major power forces (US and USSR) had withdrawn long before from any active role in combat. In the current Afghan conflict US forces had been slated to leave in May, but Joe Biden had delayed the withdrawal until a target date of September 11. The ensuing offensive swept away Afghan security forces so fast that nation is now under Taliban control almost a month before that date. Biden had reassured reporters in July that this wouldn’t happen and that 300,000 Afghan troops would be well equipped and trained to deter the Taliban. That obviously not only was a false prediction, but was possibly borne out of faulty US intelligence or misinformation that became main messaging. One statement made this weekend to CBS News held that there could still be American diplomats in Afghanistan by August 31. Another assessment widely circulated on August 11 speculated that it would take 30-90 days for Kabul to fall.
Another difference that cannot be understated is that the Taliban accomplished the capture of more of Afghanistan than they had ever ruled, even prior to 2001. During their previous time controlling the country the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massood and Abdul Rashid Dostum had held control of the northern and northeastern sectors of the country. Today those zones are ruled by the Taliban.
For those of us that grew up in the shadow of 9-11 it provides a grim conclusion to a complicated and painful era. However, for those in power that made those decisions the consequences will be small and the finger pointing will be a minor inconvenience compared to those wounded or who lost family or loved ones in the conflict. US Sec. of State Antony Blinken said this Sunday that “Kabul is not Saigon” and that the mission was successful. Perhaps the conclusion that should be taken from this was that at least in Saigon illusions were burst whereas in Kabul they were hidden and ignored.