Bush and his advisers made the same assumption about the Afghan people. The Johnson administration made the absurd assumption that deep in the heart of every Vietnamese there was an American yearning to be born. And so, to a greater degree than is usually realized, the United States went into both conflicts half-blind, convinced that the righteousness of the cause would compensate for ignorance, and ensure success. policymakers were woefully ignorant of the political and cultural dynamics of the nation they aimed to transform. It is depressing, to say the least, but we failed in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons we stumbled in Vietnam, almost 50 years ago.Īt the outset of each conflict, U.S. The forced withdrawal from Afghanistan ranks among the most humiliating episodes in all of America’s 400-year history, for it symbolizes in dramatic fashion the end of a horrendously destructive failed crusade to export American-style democracy by arrogant policymakers transfixed by their own country’s raw military power. The same thing happened in 1975, more or less, as the ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, mysteriously refused to give the order to evacuate when the writing was on the wall, and CIA operatives had already begun evacuating their Vietnamese allies surreptitiously.
Their failure is all the more inexplicable in light of the fact that both the CIA and the State Department provided the president with sound intelligence estimates during the last weeks of the Taliban’s stunning advance. In Kabul, this extremely difficult operation was unnecessarily complicated and compromised by the failure of senior decision-makers in the White House and State Department to anticipate the rapid collapse of the Kabul government’s armed forces and government in the face of a determined and well-organized adversary, the Taliban. It was somehow fitting that the last Americans who left Vietnam did so when they were for all intents and purposes blind.Īny soldier or Marine can tell you that orchestrating a “retrograde movement” is among the trickiest and most delicate of military maneuvers. on April 30, 1975, were blinded for a few minutes by tear gas they had fired to keep desperate Vietnamese from trying to jump into their overloaded aircraft. The Marines who took the last chopper off the embassy roof around 7:50 a.m. Nonetheless, the evacuation will be seen by historians for generations for what it was: the sobering last act in yet another lost American war.
Air Force transport as began its takeoff, parents passing a baby to Marine guards on the tense perimeter of the airport, and horrific mayhem following two massive suicide bombings by Islamic State of Khorasan terrorists, succeeded in evacuating about 123,000 people-an astonishing feat, carried out with great skill and courage by the American military. The harried American withdrawal, replete with scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the rear of a giant U.S. Shortly thereafter, the Taliban’s senior spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, announced to the Afghan people: “This victory belongs to us all.” Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Among its passengers was the last American soldier to depart this hard, mountainous, war-ravaged country, Maj. military plane, a C-17 transport, lumbered into the skies above the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The American war in Afghanistan came to a long-overdue end on the evening of Aug.
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