When Joe Biden was asked last week if there was any similarity between Kabul today and Saigon in 1975, he said no:
“None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our Embassy. Six if I’m not mistaken. The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army. They’re not – they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy [in Afghanistan].”
He also defended the withdrawal by asking:
“Let me ask those who want us to stay: How many more – how many thousands more Americans, daughters and sons – are you willing to risk?”1
Actually, to understand why President Biden wants to leave Afghanistan, you have to remember that he came of age politically during the Vietnam War. Former President Obama was ten in 1971. President Biden was in the Senate. George H.W. Bush thought our success in the Gulf War in 1991 would rid us of the Vietnam Syndrome. It didn’t for President Biden.
You can see that in the second quote listed above. Staying in Afghanistan and continuing to help the Afghan people would not have risked “thousands” of American lives. The U.S. military hasn’t suffered a fatality in combat since February of 2020. Part of that may be because the Trump administration negotiated a “peace” agreement with the Taliban in early 2020. But most of it is because our troops aren’t involved in combat. We’ve been doing non-direct combat activities. The Afghan forces are the ones who have been doing the fighting.
Some of those defending the withdrawal have pointed to how badly things have been going in Afghanistan as a reason to leave. But that is not a reason to get out. That’s happening because we are getting out. Things started to get worse in Afghanistan when President Trump’s “peace” agreement required that the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 government forces held captive by the Taliban.
When President Biden set a final date for leaving, is it any surprise that Afghans started to give up and look out for themselves? It’s what happened in 1975 when the Democratic Congress, of which then-Senator Biden was a part, dramatically reduced aid to South Vietnam.
Two comments on those arguments, by both President Biden and former President Trump, among others, how long we have been in Afghanistan and how little we have accomplished.
1. First, have they looked at how long we were in South Korea before they got a democratic government? It was more than 30 years after the end of the Korean War. We effectively protected Taiwan for longer than that before the dictatorship there became the democracy they have today.
But it really isn’t even about democracy. To the extent that George W. Bush said it was, he was wrong. It’s about a semi-decent government that lets people live their own lives and isn’t run by a bunch of religious nut-jobs. President Biden said “[i]t’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.” I agree, but I don’t see why we couldn’t give them a little help to stop the crazy people in the Taliban from deciding for them. Especially since those crazy people are a danger to us, too.
Also, when President Biden talks about how long we have been in Afghanistan and how Afghanistan is a forever war, he misses the point that he wanted out in 2009. He opposed Barack Obama’s surge in 2009. He isn’t getting out because it’s been 20 years. He wanted out after eight.
2. Part of the reason things have gone so poorly in Afghanistan is how bad our policies have been over the years. The George W. Bush administration didn’t give Afghanistan the attention it needed after we invaded Iraq. While former President Obama called Afghanistan the good war during the 2008 campaign, he didn’t want to stay. Even when he was convinced to send in a surge, he told the Taliban when our troops would be leaving before they even got there. That’s not the way it’s done. But, at least, he was willing to face facts, so we didn’t leave even though he wanted to.
Then came former President Trump. What a mess. At the beginning of his administration, some of his advisers thought they had convinced him to stay and help. But that only lasted until he talked to the next group of people. Ultimately, he decided to get out. He just wasn’t competent enough at governing to get it done.
President Biden is going to get it done. So, while there is some blame for former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, and a lot of blame for former President Trump, President Biden gets the credit, or blame, for pulling out of Afghanistan when we didn’t have to. We could have stayed and helped, as we have been, with things like airpower, logistics, medevac flights, training, etc. Our NATO partners would have stayed, too. It would have given the Afghans a chance to fight for a decent life. We had to keep the North Koreans out of the south after 1953. We kept the Communists from invading Taiwan. Both of those worked out. Maybe Afghanistan would have worked out, too. We certainly could have helped make sure that Afghanistan wouldn’t become a base of Islamic radicals again. And the cost would have been a reasonable insurance policy. But President Biden didn’t want to do it.
Ultimately, I’m not sure it was the specifics of today’s situation in Afghanistan was the deciding factor for President Biden. As I said before, he has wanted to get out of Afghanistan since at least 2009. One wonders if what we are doing in Afghanistan isn’t mostly because of a set of views President Biden developed during the Vietnam War and hasn’t changed since. As a Democratic senator, he helped make sure we abandoned South Vietnam in 1974 and 1975. Now it seems like he is doing it all over again, this time in Afghanistan. We will see, over the next months and years, if it works better in Afghanistan than it did in South Vietnam.
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1 Foreign Policy, “Morning Brief,” July 9, 2021.
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