No More Vietnams?
Roger Rosewall, D.Eng.
Systems Engineer Supporting US Customs and Border Protection
As U.S. forces depart Afghanistan the Taliban is rapidly taking control of vast sections of that country.?If the Taliban defeats the current American-backed government of Afghanistan, as now seems likely, many Americans, perhaps most, will likely give it little further thought.?They should be outraged.
Former president Richard Nixon's book No More Vietnams was published in 1985.?As the serving president at the time U.S. forces left Vietnam in 1973, Nixon wanted to provide an analysis of that long military conflict and to help ensure the experience would not be repeated. [1]
"When we signed the Paris Peace agreements in 1973, we had won the war. We then proceeded to lose the peace. The South Vietnamese successfully countered Communist violations of the cease-fire for two years. Defeat came only when the Congress, ignoring the specific terms of the peace agreement, refused to provide military aid equal to what the Soviet Union provided Hanoi."
Shades of April 1975
In April 1975, two years after U.S. forces left South Vietnam, the army of communist North Vietnam entered Saigon (now Ho Chi-Minh City) and took control of the entire country. Today a similar pattern can be seen in Afghanistan. By December 2001 U.S. forces had successfully completed the mission of driving Al Queda and the Taliban out from Afghanistan.[2] Now, 20 years later, U.S.?forces are leaving Afghanistan, but unlike Vietnam, they are doing so while at the same time Taliban forces are re-taking control of the country.
Hamid Karzai, former president of Afghanistan, recently provided the following assessment of the situation in that country. [3]
"We are in shambles. The country is in conflict. There is immense suffering for the Afghan people. How did the American-Nato exercise in Afghanistan lead to this? Those who came here 20 years ago in the name of fighting extremism and terrorism not only failed to end it but, under their watch, extremism in Afghanistan has flourished. That is what I call a failure.”
American military and political leadership failures
Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary from 1961 to 1968, said in later years that intervention in Vietnam had been wrong, and he "attributed the failure to a lack of knowledge and judgment."[4] In 2015 Lieutenant General Douglas Lute provided a similar assessment of Afghanistan, "blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department." [5]
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing ... What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking ... If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost"
The costs in American blood and treasure
The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates more than 170,000 people were killed in Afghanistan during the period from October 2001 to April 2021. [6] The Department of Defense estimates 2,442 U.S. troops have been killed and 20,666 wounded in the war since 2001.[7]
The financial cost of the conflict is estimated to be approximately $2.26 trillion. [8]?To provide some context for that number, consider the sum total of Americans' student loan debt is approximately $1.71 trillion.[9]?In other words, the money spent in Afghanistan could have paid off all student loans, and $551 billion would still remain!
Where is the outrage?
Less than 50 years after the fall of Saigon, Americans are once more confronted with a defeat of national interests, with governmental "dysfunction" of colossal magnitude, with the loss of thousands of lives, and with the squandering of trillions of dollars of national wealth. In coming years, readers will be presented with numerous historical analyses and memoirs regarding the American experience in Afghanistan, all trying to explain what happened and why. In the end, the only real question that must be answered: How many times will we repeat Vietnam before American voters become engaged and demand accountability from their government?
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Postscript: The fall of Kabul
In August 2021 the Taliban began seizing large areas in Afghanistan. On 12 August 2021 I posted a poll in four different Linkedin Groups:
The polling question: "The Taliban will occupy Kabul before the end of September 2021." The poll was open for 2 weeks. The poll was quickly overcome by events. By 16 August 2021, just 4 days after the poll went live, the Taliban occupied Kabul. The following graphic illustrates the results of the poll captured on 16 August.
Number of respondents:
Averages for all four groups:
The poll has several limitations:
NOTES
[1] The Richard Nixon Foundation. “No More Vietnams,” September 1, 2017. https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2017/09/no-more-vietnams/.
[2] Zucchino, David. “The Afghanistan War: How Did It Start, and How Is It Ending?” The New York Times, May 13, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/article/afghanistan-war-us.html.
[3] Loyd, Anthony. “You Have Failed, Karzai Tells Allies Leaving Afghanistan after 20 Years.” The Times, June 30, 2021. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/you-have-failed-karzai-tells-allies-leaving-afghanistan-after-20-years-h0qkz0xzv.
[4] Appy, Christian G. “Opinion | What Was the Vietnam War About?” The New York Times, March 26, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/opinion/what-was-the-vietnam-war-about.html.
[5] Whitlock, Craig. “U.S. Officials Misled the Public about the War in Afghanistan, Confidential Documents Reveal.” The Washington Post, December 9, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/?nid.
[6] Watson Institute. “Human and Budgetary Costs to Date of the U.S. War in Afghanistan, 2001-2021.” The Costs of War. Brown University. Accessed July 14, 2021. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2021.
[7] Debre, Isabel. “Counting the Costs of America’s 20-Year War in Afghanistan.” Associated Press, April 30, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-afghanistan-middle-east-business-5e850e5149ea0a3907cac2f282878dd5.
[8] Watson Institute. “Human and Budgetary Costs to Date of the U.S. War in Afghanistan, 2001-2021.” The Costs of War. Brown University. Accessed July 14, 2021. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2021.
[9] Student Loan Hero. “U.S. Student Loan Debt Statistics for 2021.” Lending Tree. Accessed July 14, 2021. https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/.
Systems Engineer Supporting US Customs and Border Protection
3 年"But the larger question remains: How did this happen? Why is America's longest ever war ending on such an abysmal note? And why does such an eminently germane question go not only unanswered but also unasked?" https://www.businessinsider.com/us-generals-need-to-answer-for-military-failure-in-afghanistan-2021-8
Systems Engineer Supporting US Customs and Border Protection
3 年John Bolton “We weren’t defeated,” Bolton told CNN in an interview. “You have to be defeated to lose a war. We’ve given up because we’ve lost patience. That’s a sad commentary about the current administration, but it’s not a defeat for the United States," https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/16/john-bolton-war-afghanistan-withdrawal-499815 Bolton is partially correct. The U.S. had achieved its declared mission back in 2001. As far as keeping the Taliban out of power, that is now in the hands of the Afghan people. They've had 20 years to decide what they want for their country. It's all up to them now.