Update: The Pentagon's Chief of Staff testified to Congress that he did not think the evacuation of Kabul would end like the collapse of Saigon in 1975. NOT! Video footage has emerged showing desperate Afghans clinging to a moving US military aircraft attempting to flee the victorious Taliban. Some Afghans fell to their deaths from C-17 undercarriage as the plane flew away over Kabul. Horrified onlookers saw them fall one by one. Access to the Kabul airport is now only through multiple Taliban checkpoints; the civilian side of the airport is unsecured and civilian flights have been cancelled. Embassy staff have been evacuated by helicopter to the secured perimeter. Thousands of Afghans seeking escape have crowed onto the tarmac. Three were reportedly run over by a moving aircraft. US officials have ordered in more personnel to enforce order, doubling the size of the contingent covering the exit; two armed men at the airport were killed by US soldiers.
"Step back" apologetics aside, the parallels to Vietnam are striking: the US backed a corrupt regime with limited popular support against a motivated nationalist insurgency. The empire wasted billions attempting to stand-up an army that in the end was demoralized, accommodating, and unwilling to fight. The American warlords held their charges in little regard, disdaining a culture they do not fully understand and were attempting to supplant with a version of their own. They underestimated the resolve of the enemy, influence of the drug trade, and overestimated their technological advantage. A notable difference: Saigon held out for eleven days against the NVA, the Taliban took Kabul in a single day thanks in large part to capitulations negotiated by kinsmen.
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| Taliban aboard captured HumVee in Kabul |
{15.08.21}The Taliban has entered Kabul, the last city held by government forces. There are negotiations with Taliban leaders for a hand-over of government to prevent a bloody battle for the capital. The current president, Asraf Ghani, has fled the country, reports say to Tajikistan. The only issue remaining for the US is: can it extract civilian personnel without major fighting or "mission creep" by reinforcements sent in by air? Presumably the two Marine battalions and one Army battalion will be able to hold the international airport open for evacuees, hoping to avoid scenes reminiscent of Saigon, 1975. A battalion of the 82nd Airborne will also go in as reinforcements, representing another 1,000 infantry personnel. The Secretary of State said earlier that the mission is temporary, and only for the purpose of evacuation and self-defense. Subsequent events will prove the veracity of that statement.
The speed of Afghan government collapse has shaken the White House The Talib fighters took Mazar-i-Sharif in the north on Saturday. Jalalabad in the east fell today, the last city under government control other than the capital. In many cases militia and government security forces fled before the nationwide offensive without a fight, proving once again that ideology is stronger than bombs. US intelligence officials thought the defeat of the central government would at least take months or perhaps a year--it happened in weeks. Even the South Vietnamese government lasted two years after American troops departed. The US expended some $88 billion*, twenty-two thousand casualties, and twenty years trying to set up a viable secular government to control the fractious tribal region. It fragrantly ignored the futile experience of the Soviet and British empires in Afghanistan, staying in country longer than the British and twice as long as the Soviets. Its military failure in South Vietnam was also deemed irrelevant to its nation building effort. In reality the war in Afghanistan was a twenty-year gravy train for the Pentagon and its civilian contractors.
Afghanistan must be left to its own devices, however distasteful that may be to western liberal sensibilities. The United States may have been justified invading the country to find and kill Osama Bin Laden in 2001, but once he escaped Tora Bora and fled to Pakistan, that justification evaporated. The Taliban has said it would not allow the country to again become a base of operations for international terrorists. Now, the west has no choice but to accept their word.“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.” He should be given credit for the courage of his conviction. [photo credit: NYT]
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| a Chinook over the US Embassy in Kabul: AP |
*spent on creating an Afghan government army. According to Brown University researchers the total cost of the war is estimated at $2.3 trillion UN's estimate for slowing climate change: $300 billion