Watching the news this past week has been a flashback to April 1975, and the rapid advance of the North Vietnamese Army and their Viet Cong insurgency allies in South Vietnam on the capitol of Saigon.
The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) collapsed in the face of this lightening assault, and Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. The helicopter evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon from the rooftop is a scene forever burned into my memory.
The U.S. was in Vietnam from 1955 to 1973, when Ricard Nixon signed the Paris Peace Accords and agreed to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The last U.S. combat operations left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, after 58,220 American casualties.
This morning, the New York Times reports, Taliban Advances on Kabul; U.S. Embassy Evacuation Underway:
The Taliban’s relentless, rapid advance across Afghanistan brought them on Sunday to the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, the last major city controlled by the government.
The news that the Taliban were encroaching on the capital was certain to alarm thousands of Afghans who had sought refuge there after fleeing the insurgents’ brutal military offensive.
The Taliban, in a statement, said that they were in negotiations with the government and would not take the capital by force. “The Islamic Emirate instructs all its forces to stand at the gates of Kabul, not to try to enter the city,” a spokesman said, using the name by which the insurgents refer to themselves.
The Afghan government had no immediate public response.
The United States military has begun evacuating American diplomatic and civilian staff. A core group of American diplomats who had planned to remain at the embassy in Kabul were being moved to a diplomatic facility at the international airport, where they would stay for an unspecified amount of time, according to a senior United States official.
Note: Every American must leave Afghanistan now. No one stays. We do not want another 1979 Iranian hostage situation, or worse, the Taliban executing Americans live on television. Extract every American and then level the embassy so that the Taliban does not have war booty to flaunt to the world. And yes, we have failed our Afghan allies (interpreters and their families) just as we did in Vietnam, because the State Department held up their visa applications for years, and poor planning by the Pentagon. This humanitarian disaster is playing out in real time today.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was expected to speak about the situation later Sunday.
After days in which one urban center after another fell to the insurgents, the last major Afghan cities besides Kabul that were still controlled by the government were seized in rapid succession over the weekend.
The insurgents took Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, late on Saturday, only an hour after breaking through the front lines at the city’s edge. Soon after, government security forces and militias — including those led by the infamous warlords Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad Noor — fled, effectively handing control to the insurgents.
On Sunday morning, the Taliban seized the eastern city of Jalalabad. In taking that provincial capital and surrounding areas, the insurgents gained control of the Torkham border crossing, a major trade and transit route between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Taliban offensive, which started in May when the United States began withdrawing troops, gathered speed over the past week. In city after city, the militants took down Afghan government flags and hoisted their own white banners.
Despite two decades of war with American-led forces, the Taliban have survived and thrived, without giving up their vision of creating a state governed by a stringent Islamic code.
Despite many Afghans’ memories of years under Taliban rule before the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the insurgents have taken control of much of the country in recent days with only minimal resistance.
Their rapid successes have exposed the weakness of an Afghan military that the United States spent more than $83 billion to support over the past two decades. As the insurgents’ campaign has accelerated, soldiers and police officers have abandoned the security forces in ever greater numbers, as the cause for which they risked their lives appeared increasingly to be lost.
Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, has resisted pressure to step down. In a recorded speech aired on Saturday, he pledged to “prevent further instability” and called for “remobilizing” the country’s military. But the president is increasingly isolated, and his words seemed detached from the reality around him. [Afghanistan’s “Baghdad Bob”].
The speed of the Taliban’s advance has thrown exit planning into disarray. While many analysts had believed that the Afghan military could be overrun after international forces withdrew – it was inevitable – they thought it would happen over months and years. Now it risks being completed in a matter of days and weeks.
President Biden has accelerated the deployment of an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan to help get American citizens out. He made it clear that he would not reverse his decision to withdraw all combat forces.
“I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats,” Mr. Biden said on Saturday afternoon. “I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
The deployment that Mr. Biden announced on Saturday to assist with the evacuations will bring the American troop presence to 5,000, if only briefly. He said he still planned to pull all combat forces out of the country and remove them from “harm’s way.”
A frenzied flight from Kabul as the U.S. evacuation accelerates.
As the Taliban stood at the gates of Kabul, completing the near total takeover of Afghanistan two decades after the American military drove them from power, a chaotic and frenzied evacuation of U.S. diplomats and civilians kicked into high gear on Sunday.
Helicopter after helicopter — including massive Chinooks with their twin engines and speedy Black Hawks that had been the workhorse of the grinding war — touched down and then took off loaded with passengers. Some dispensed flares overhead, a new addition to Kabul’s skyline.
Those being evacuated included a core group of American diplomats who had planned to remain at the embassy in Kabul, according to a senior administration official. They were being moved to a compound at the international airport, where they would stay for an unspecified amount of time, the official said.
The tarmac of the airport was filled with a constellation of uniforms from different nations. They joined contractors, diplomats and civilians all trying to catch a flight out of the city. Those who were eligible to fly were given special bracelets, denoting their status as noncombatants.
But for millions of Afghans, including tens of thousands who assisted the U.S. efforts in the country for years, there were no bracelets. They were stuck in the city, wondering not if but when the Taliban would enter.
[W]hile President Biden has defended his decision to hold firm and pull the last U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the administration has become increasingly worried about images that could evoke another foreign policy disaster: the fall of Saigon at the end of the conflict in Vietnam in 1975.
You mean like this from this morning?
The swift advance of the Taliban has stunned many in the White House.
The Pentagon issued dire warnings to Mr. Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan Army, but intelligence estimates, now shown to have badly missed the mark, assessed that it might happen in 18 months, not in weeks.
On Sunday, as a sense of panic gripped Kabul, convoys of armored vehicles raced to find safety in the headquarters of what had been the NATO center for its Operation Resolute Support. Apache gunships circled overhead.
The goal of the NATO operation had been to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces. All that’s left appears to be a name consigned to the history books.
This September 11 will mark 20 years since the terrorist attack on the United States. After 20 years of a generational war in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate this September 11 by once again being in control of the entirety of Afghanistan.
Ryan Cooper writes, The war in Afghanistan has been lost for 2 decades:
The government of Afghanistan that the U.S. spent almost 20 years, $2.2 trillion, and 2,448 of its own soldiers’ lives propping up, getting something like 40,000 Afghan civilians killed, is collapsing. Taliban forces have taken cities across the country with contemptuous ease, and the fall of the capital city Kabul [imminent].
Voices from the foreign policy “Blob” are clamoring for blood. “On Afghanistan, Biden’s credibility is now shot,” writes Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times. “Jihadists are still out there and very much want to kill us,” claims Georgetown professor Paul Miller. Anonymous military officials are telling friendly journalists that Al Qaeda is going to come back.
The reality is that the war in Afghanistan has been lost for nearly 20 years already. Prolonging the fighting can only delay the inevitable.
The collapse of putative Afghan government forces is happening so quickly that the lack of a few thousand American troops cannot possibly be the main reason why. Very likely the Taliban was simply biding its time — only launching its assault once American forces were largely out of the way and seemed unlikely to fight back. Once the Afghan army was on its own, it melted away like butter in a hot skillet.
As I wrote in 2015, and again in 2017, and again in 2019, the U.S.-backed Afghan government has never been worthy of the name. It has always been incompetent, riddled with corruption (thanks in large part to the clumsy and monumentally crooked American occupation), and never had anything like broad legitimacy. The passage of time did nothing to help these problems. It turns out that a domestic government that depends utterly on a ruthless and/or apathetic foreign conqueror whose forces routinely inflict terrible carnage on the local population (either accidentally or on purpose) does not sink deep roots.
As journalist Spencer Ackerman notes, the hard truth is that war in Afghanistan was lost only a few months after it began: in December, 2001. That was when the Taliban, reeling from American attacks, tried to negotiate surrender terms. Their requests were quite modest — mainly just for their leader Mohammad Omar to be able to live under house arrest.
Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected them out of hand. “I do not think there will be a negotiated end to the situation, that’s unacceptable to the United States,” he said. It takes truly world-historical arrogance to refuse a quick and easy end to a war in the most notoriously hard-to-occupy place on the planet, but that’s what happened. (Negotiated settlements were attempted again in 2003 and 2010-11, but neither worked, arguably doomed by Rumsfeld’s appalling decision.)
In June, Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the $6.5 trillion forever war, died at 88:
The Middle East wars, America’s longest, came at a huge cost. The U.S. spent an estimated $6.5 trillion on the two invasions and occupations, losing nearly 7,000 U.S. service members in the process. Meanwhile, an estimated 800,000 died in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly national police, military, civilians, and opposition fighters. The wars also unleashed unrest across the Middle East as the U.S. military fought the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, and then later a number of insurgent groups.
Rot in Hell, motherfucker.
The Taliban thus settled on the only option available to them: a war of attrition. They figured the Americans would be no better at standing up a client government than the Soviets or the British before them, and could be harassed out of the country eventually. They were correct. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Afghan history — particularly the failure of the incomprehensibly brutal tactics used by Soviet occupiers — could have predicted this outcome.
Twenty years of occupation have not changed the fact that the Taliban is by far the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it has made them stronger — allowing them to practice endlessly at guerrilla warfare, to gain support as the most credible force trying to throw off the yoke of despised foreign aggressors, and pick up tons of free weapons. Much of the billions and billions of dollars spent on trying to stand up an Afghan army has ended up directly in Taliban hands, as they pick up equipment abandoned by rotten U.S.-supplied formations. The ongoing rout is handing them all kinds of goodies.
All this makes the argument that U.S. credibility is somehow at stake here completely preposterous. American credibility was already shot from burning up trillions of dollars in war any sane person could see was lost a decade ago. Staying longer and burning up more trillions of dollars would only make America look even more idiotic and self-delusional, and get more people killed in the meantime.
Make no mistake, the Taliban reconquest is going to be brutal for many, particularly women. As Ackerman writes, “One of the consequences of waging Forever Wars is that they obscure what it means to lose a war. This is what it means: the Enemy wins. The Enemy’s victory will likely be terrible. Among the reasons it is so terrible is that the United States of America is an accessory to it.”
There is only one thing America can do to help the Afghan civilians put in danger by its imperialist bungling: accept refugees. The thousands of people who worked for the American occupation, and the thousands more who are already being displaced by renewed conflict, ought to be able to find a home in the United States. [Too late now, unless the Taliban somehow allows them to leave.]
If the sight of yet another humiliating overseas defeat is troubling, in the future let us avoid imperialist wars of aggression.
UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that Afghanistan’s “Baghdad Bob,” President Ashraf Ghani, has now fled the country. Afghan president flees the country as Taliban move on Kabul:
Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.
President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country, two officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief journalists. Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, later confirmed in an online video that Ghani had left.
“The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation,” Abdullah said. “God should hold him accountable.”
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“I said it was ONE of the greatest humiliations in American history…”
John, I tried to point out that in Vietnam, at least half of the years spent in combat were for no reason other than to spare the US warmongers the humiliation of losing to a small, poor country in Southeast Asia. Humiliation might actually be a good thing at times, certainly for bullies.
Anyhow, I gave this some thought. Maybe the real sting here at the end of this 20 year conflict in Afghanistan is mostly about the US once again losing their moral authority in front of the entire world.
Well, John, it’s been a hell of long time since the Allies marched through Paris. Most of our post-WW2 military and CIA interventions haven’t worked out so well. And those who suffer most tend to be those who were invaded, attacked, occupied, and manipulated. The aftermath is always horrible and the lessons are never learned.
Anyone who says all the blame for this week is on Biden is either an idiot or a liar.
John Kavanagh says all the blame for this week is on Biden.
Johnny Johnny Johnny. Instead of placing all the blame on Biden, which I guess is all I can expect from a mindless hack. you may want to brush up on recent history (which you won’t). In it’s first term Obama’s administration did a pretty bad job processing Afghani refugees but during the second term they did a pretty good job. Then The Former Guy’s administration smashed the program to smithereens on purpose. Remember they hated refugees except those from Northern Europe? Now all these Afghans are stuck there because The Former Guy’s minions (of which you’re apparently proud to belong) made sure they couldn’t leave. The Former Guy and his Afghan refugee policies are just as complicit as the Taliban in the deaths of those who helped our military.
But hey! Why let the truth get in the way of a good smear? Right Johnny Boy?
First of all, I did not say it was the greatest, I said it was ONE of the greatest humiliations in American history, so it can stand beside Vietnam. And I do mourn for the women and other victims who will die and suffer because of President Biden’s blunder.
Regarding: “Here’s an interesting fact, John. Did you know that the median age in Afghanistan is 1.4 yrs old? It is a nation of children, half the population are children. And they grew up under US occupation and some of those kids were getting an education and had hope for the future, they believed they could have a better life. So how does America’s humiliation stack up next to the loss of a generation and perhaps another?” …..more blame for Biden.
As the days pass we learn of more and more Biden mistakes, such as not destroying our military equipment and files. So now the Taliban has the names and descriptions of everyone who helped America and they can send our advanced military equipment to China to be reversed engineered. It also appears that President Biden acted contrary to the advice of his military advisers, which makes this even more on President Biden.
And one might ask what ever lead President Biden to remove the military before he took care of US citizens in the country, those that helped us, and our records and military supplies. Biden has failed on so many levels it’s hard to keep track of them all.
“Jimmy Carter, who wanted to get us off of mid-east oil…”
Carter’s way of thinking was ahead of his time, at least in this country. Nice that he’s lived long enough to be vindicated. Instead we get Reagan and the backward slide begins again. By the time Clinton is president, he can’t even legislate a healthcare bill, gives up and becomes a DINO after the 1994 midterms.
But we had another chance in the 90s with the technology boom, the commercial availability of the Internet, etc…Real opportunities opened up, the possibilities seemed endless.
Then came Bush II.
It seems like we’re in a loop. Republican disasters followed by Democratic mop ups and minimal progress. Trump was the low point, I pray we don’t go lower. But now we’re fighting for voting rights like it’s the 1960s.
If we go back a little further in time, and we’d have listened to either Eisenhower (beware the military industrial complex) or Jimmy Carter, who wanted to get us off of mid-east oil, we’d be in a much better world.
Or at least the rest of the world would be in a much better world.
“The real fix for all of this was crushed by the SCOTUS in Bush v. Gore.”
I still think about that too. Imagine this country without the Bush era PNAC warmongers and the Bush Recession and instead having a president who would have moved us forward into the 21st century.
So much has been squandered.
The real fix for all of this was crushed by the SCOTUS in Bush v. Gore.
Correcting a type-o to my comment (August 17, 2021 at 8:57 am).
The median age in Afghanistan is 18.4 yrs old.
“What happened in Afghanistan this week is one of the greatest humiliations in America’s history and it’s on President Biden and nothing you can say can spend that away.”
No, that would be Vietnam and not just the botched evacuation of Saigon in 1975, two years after the end of US combat operations. We lost 58K Americans and Vietnam lost over 3 million civilians and soldiers (2 million civilians) plus the South Vietnamese soldiers who died, approximately 250K.
But the issue was “peace with honor” as I recall. America was not to be humiliated by a tiny country the US warmongers invaded to “stop the spread of communism.” Americans didn’t want to die for that, but we had to keep up the slaughter until someone could figure out a way to make it appear as though America won the war.
That didn’t happen, of course. America was humiliated anyhow. But the humiliation has shifted from America losing the conflict to the shame felt by later generations who do not understand why millions of people were sacrificed for no justifiable reason.
Anyhow, John, why does this always have to be about America’s “humiliation?” If you want to weep about this, then weep for the women and girls who will suffer horribly under Taliban rule.
Here’s an interesting fact, John. Did you know that the median age in Afghanistan is 1.4 yrs old? It is a nation of children, half the population are children. And they grew up under US occupation and some of those kids were getting an education and had hope for the future, they believed they could have a better life. So how does America’s humiliation stack up next to the loss of a generation and perhaps another?
Anyhow, name a post-WWII American military (or CIA) intervention that went well for those who were invaded, occupied, attacked or interfered with. Seems like we would learn, sooner or later, but we haven’t yet.
Selective history there, John? As usual? Speaking of botched, how’s your COVID plans working?
Lil’ Johnny Kavanagh likes to pretend things.
Like we can have forever wars, GW Bush was super smart, and T4ump never invited the Taliban to Camp David or signed a worthless peace deal with them.
The blame is all around on this one, Lil Johnny, to say otherwise is called lying.
And really? Politico? CNN? And earlier you were linking to the NY Post?
No wonder you’re so screwed up in the head.
Maybe the correct thing would’ve been for the US to leave Afghanistan when we first arrived and discovered that Al-Qaeda was gone, but we didn’t leave. Maybe that was a good idea because the Taliban was friendly to terrorist and may have continued to make Afghanistan a haven and base for terrorist to attack the world, including America. That is a debatable point.
But Afghanistan was not a costly drain on American lives in the recent past. In fact, only two American soldiers died in Afghanistan since February 2000, making it a safer place than Chicago. So why did President Biden decide to leave and create a vacuum that most people knew would allow the Taliban to come back?
President Biden blew it on two fronts. There was no need to remove a small number of American soldiers that were in Afghanistan. And he should’ve made it clear to the Taliban, as President Trump did, that if they re-enter the country, the US would bomb them back to the Stone Age.
The talking point that President Biden is not responsible because this started with President Trump’s policy is ridiculous because President Biden was not bound by President Trump’s policy as demonstrated by his having canceled many of President Trump’s other policies during his short time as president.
What happened in Afghanistan this week is one of the greatest humiliations in America’s history and it’s on President Biden and nothing you can say can spend that away. Even Politico and CNN are saying that.
A few thoughts on the domestic political impacts:
The Republicans are going to as hard as they can to make Biden look bad. By this time next year it will have worn off.
The Biden administration knows there is a short term political price to be paid but are betting that by this time next year the benefits of the infrastructure bills will be kicking in and will push the Afgan debacle out of the news.
“It’s the economy stupid” is still operating.
Some Republicans (think Liz Cheney, et all) know the above and are already trying to move on.
How quickly Republicans have forgotten this fiasco from 2019: “How Trump’s Plan to Secretly Meet With the Taliban Came Together, and Fell Apart,” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/world/asia/afghanistan-trump-camp-david-taliban.html
On the Friday before Labor Day, President Trump gathered top advisers in the Situation Room to consider what could be among the profound decisions of his presidency — a peace plan with the Taliban after 18 years of grinding, bloody war in Afghanistan.
The meeting brought to a head a bristling conflict dividing his foreign policy team for months, pitting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo against John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, in a battle for the competing instincts of a president who relishes tough talk but promised to wind down America’s endless wars.
As they discussed terms of the agreement, Mr. Pompeo and his negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, made the case that it would enable Mr. Trump to begin withdrawing troops while securing a commitment from the Taliban not to shelter terrorists. Mr. Bolton, beaming in by video from Warsaw, where he was visiting, argued that Mr. Trump could keep his campaign pledge to draw down forces without getting in bed with killers swathed in American blood.
Mr. Trump made no decision on the spot, but at some point during the meeting the idea was floated to finalize the negotiations in Washington, a prospect that appealed to the president’s penchant for dramatic spectacle. Mr. Trump suggested that he would even invite President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, whose government has not been party to the talks, and get him to sign on.
In the days that followed, Mr. Trump came up with an even more remarkable idea — he would not only bring the Taliban to Washington, but to Camp David, the crown jewel of the American presidency. The leaders of a rugged militant organization deemed terrorists by the United States would be hosted in the mountain getaway used for presidents, prime ministers and kings just three days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that led to the Afghan war.
[W]hat would have been one of the biggest headline-grabbing moments of his tenure was put together on the spur of the moment and then canceled on the spur of the moment. The usual National Security Council process was dispensed with; only a small circle of advisers was even clued in.
Key point: “the peace negotiations left out Afghanistan’s government, and Mr. Ghani’s officials criticized it for lacking measures that would ensure stability.”
And again in 2020, an attempted “October Surprise” for election purposes that his own Pentagon torpedoed: “Trump: US will be out of Afghanistan by Christmas,” https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/10/07/trump-us-will-be-out-of-afghanistan-by-christmas/
President Donald Trump announced via tweet Wednesday night that all remaining U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan should be withdrawn by Christmas, putting an end to the 19-year American military conflict there.
On Wednesday evening, just a few hours before the vice presidential debate, Trump wrote on Twitter that “we should have the small remaining number of our brave men and women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas.”
We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020
Weeks later, “Trump has ‘no plan’ to exit Afghanistan by Christmas, key lawmaker says”, https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/10/29/trump-has-no-plan-to-exit-afghanistan-by-xmas-key-lawmaker-says/
Weeks after the U.S. military was blindsided by President Donald Trump’s assertion that all U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, a top lawmaker on defense says there was no actual plan to withdraw troops by Christmas.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith on Thursday echoed U.S. officials who have reportedly said there were not aware of the plan and received no actual order to accelerate the gradual pullout they’ve been executing. The military will continue a gradual pullout, Smith said.
[The United States signed the agreement with the Taliban in Doha on February 29, 2020, committing to a pullout of US and NATO troops by May 1, 2021. Biden unilaterally extended that deadline to September 11, 2021.]
Best comment I have seen all day from MeidasTouch.com on Twitter, https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1426944044622508036
After starting multiple endless wars, selling out the Kurds, inviting the Taliban to Camp David on 9/11, selling out our allies and embracing our enemies, and orchestrating a terror attack against the United States, we don’t want to hear a damn thing from Republicans.
GREAT post Meanie! I couldn’t agree more. If the Afghan people are unwilling to stand up for themselves, it wouldn’t matter how long we stayed. We didn’t have clear objectives when we began and we had no Exit Strategy to end it. Doomed from the start. Biden showed courage in calling it quits.