I know a brother and sister who fled Afghanistan. Unlike many refugees from most other countries, they have absolutely zero nostalgia for their homeland. If they could get that memory-erasing procedure from “Eternal Sunshine,” they would erase all memory of Afghanistan. America would probably like to do the same thing, because the “graveyard of empires” will now add another prominent tombstone to the many already there. The Afghanis have been invaded and/or terrorized by just about every famous conqueror you can name.
Darius the Great King? Check.
Alexander the Great? Check.
Tamerlane? Check.
Genghis Khan? Check.
Al-Qaeda? Check.
The Soviet Union? Several checks.
The British Empire? Several checks.
Only the Romans managed to avoid it. (They stopped near the modern Iran/Iraq border.)
Sooner or later, all those invaders were gone, often with many regrets for having ever been there in the first place. We now join them. About 2000 American military personnel died there, and approximately another 2000 civilian contractors.
Sorry but we owed South Viet Nam nothing at that point. If their political and military leadership had been half as interested in waging the war as they were in getting rich – largely by looting the billions of dollars in US aid – it might have been a different matter. They were happy to let us do as much of the heavy lifting as possible. We lost 50000+ dead and Russia ended up getting access to the world’s most state of the art naval base (Cam Ranh Bay). And the damage to the soul of our military was beyond belief. Several of my relatives went officer (I’m the black sheep enlisted man of the family) and stayed in. One of them ended up a 4 star and can regularly be seen on TV giving Trump a piece of his mind. None of them has had anything good to say about the concept of being there in the first place.
Unfortunately South Viet Nam was gone from the moment that Diem reneged on the elections in 56 (?). It was kind of a reverse image of what had happened in South Korea where Rhee was a legitimate anti-Japanese nationalist (his fingers always hurt when it got cold after the Kempei Tai had pulled out all his nails) and the people in the South knew enough about the premythical Kim Il Sung to prefer Rhee’s style, harsh though it was, over the North. Aside here, that is not Kim’s real name. One time when I was stationed near the DMZ in 70/71, I was talking to our Mr. Kim of Motor Pool fame and said “Kim Il Sung” during a conversation. He got severely hacked and yelled “That not his name”. The real Kim Il Sung had disappeared fighting the Japanese back in the 20s I think it was; North Korea’s Kim was actually Kim something else. In Viet Nam Ho Chi Minh and Giap had seen off the French – which should have registered more strongly with us than it did – and even if they preferred to not fight another long war they would do it. Viet Nam had been fighting Chinese, Khmers, Chams, Mongols, and French for a thousand years. Why not us? Diem had no nationalistic credentials (he had been holed up in a Maryknoll seminary for the most part during the 46-54 war). He was a stridently pro-Catholic anti-Buddhist in a largely Buddhist country. His brother (who pretty much ran things) was a corrupt opium addict and his wife was a psycho given to chortling about “Buddhist barbecues”. The officer corps was staffed with Diem loyalists (who turned out to be not quite loyal enough). The only people who really wanted to fight for South Viet Nam were the refugees from the North.
No way in hell was the South going to hold out in the long run with or without our involvement. And we should have never been there in the first place.
The irony was that Ho was more in the Tito mode than of the sort of Comintern flunky that Russia staffed Eastern Europe with. As a Vietnamese he particularly had little use for the Chinese and not much more for the Russians. Oh well, the folks who would have told LBJ that that kind of thing had been purged from State by Rusk and then Dulles in the 50s. Not that LBJ would have listened anyway.
I’ve been making my way thru the Burns series and am looking forward to see whether the French thing in 75 comes up. Spring 75, SVN is going to fall within a week or so and the French in one of their better bits of inspired silliness offered to mediate a settlement between the North and South. For some reason Hanoi declined.
Thanks, Bill Deecee. It is good to read something sensible about the Vietnam war.
I have just been watching Ken Burn’s documentaries on the Vietnam War.
Very interesting perspective on the end of that war.
This “deal” with the Taliban reminds me of Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam.
Nixon promised full support to South Vietnam if the Viet Cong didn’t keep to their side of the deal and then retreated into his bunker once he had gotten all his troops safely away and abandoned the ARVN and his former allies to their fate.
I’m sure history will repeat itself in Afganistan.
I’m as hardcore of an anti-Trump person as is possible to find, but credit where credit’s due. At some point, wars simply have to end, and there is no victory to be found there. Good for him, if he gets it done.
Much in the same way only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could withdraw from Afghanistan without any major backlash from the right-wing. Still, I give him credit for making the right decision.
Trump is a surrender monkey…crappy deals as far as the eye can see.
There is no good deal to be had here, only various flavors of losing. Getting the funk out is the best move. If this holds, I won’t even mind Trump calling it a win.
This is Little League compared to Nixon going to China, which was just the biggest diplomatic bombshell since 1939. But Trump will make it out as being greater. Total ignorance combined with total shamelessness is the very essence of Our Trump.
But having said that, I’m still glad to see us out of there. This was the all-time mega mission creep. Originally there was a defined objective – get Bin Laden since the Taliban had refused to extradite him. That probably could have been quickly if we weren’t so stupid to pay locals to do the work rather than do it ourselves and incur a relatively small number of casualties. Probably ended up having ten times as many troops killed as a result. Once we determined this bird had flown, it became a war against the Taliban, which we had no business getting into, as bad they are, and nation building (and we’ve had no luck with that since Postwar Germany and Japan). We even found a pseudo-Diem/Thieu to “work with”.
As dumb as the Orange Buffoon is, I give him credit for seeing that something which hasn’t worked in going on 20 wasn’t likely to start working. I just hope he doesn’t think this pulling out thing is a concept to be applied to NATO and Korea/Japan. A foreign/military policy based on “Save money”. That shit really worked for Baldwin and the Brits in the 30s didn’t it? If Chamberlain hadn’t greenlighted the Spitfire…
And they were possibly only saved from Rome by Caesar getting done in just before the start date of his projected Parthian project. If it had succeeded, Caesar being just a little bit better general than Crassus, the Afghans (or Hellenistic Bactrians/Scythians/Parthians as they pretty much were then) would have been their usual bad neighbor selves and the inevitable punitive expedition would have been launched.
I know, some serious whatiffing, but that’s what history is for isn’t it?
It’s a nice thought, but we aren’t leaving. We’re just reducing troops to a pre-Trump level. Still, it’s a start. I bet our 3,000 guys on their way home are plenty happy about it.
We are completely out within about a year unless the Taliban double-crosses us.
The agreement lays out a 14-month timetable for the complete withdrawal of “all military forces of the United States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel.”
Let’s wait and see if that happens.