Saigon and Kabul

The featured image on this piece is from Time Magazine in September 2001.

Today it seems like a cruel joke.

I filed this piece to Magill the week after 911, and it was published the following month.

It gives me no pleasure to see the analysis contained therein utterly vindicated by the unfolding events at Kabul airport.

The parallels with Vietnam are too numerous to discount.

Firstly, in both conflicts, the United States did not understand where they were putting boots on the ground.

In Vietnam, they had no notion of the history of that people or what societal divisions had been sown there by the French empire.

The Domino Theory saw countries as monolithic blocks of wood to be toppled by the Reds.

I’m sure that the war planners in the Pentagon had no idea that the Vietnamese proudly proclaimed to all comers that they were the “Prussians of Asia”.

Their leader had been a young man in London in the 1920s working in the kitchen of the Central Hotel.

His name was Nguyen Tat Thanhn, upon hearing the news of  Terence MacSwiney’s death on hunger strike, he burst into tears, saying “a country with a citizen like this will never surrender”. He returned to Vietnam, changed his name to Hồ Chí Minh.

I doubt that General Westmoreland ever truly knew his enemy.

In the Hindu Kush, the only invading army ever to achieve their war aims had journeyed from Mongolia in order to destroy the Khwarizm Empire from 1219 to 1221.

It was Temüjin’s horse archers who were the last to succeed there militarily.

Even the army that smashed the Wehrmacht to pieces in WW2 failed to defeat the Pashtun warriors in the 1980s.

The Google analytics thingy tells me that most of ye are in Britain, so let’s focus on what the Queen’s boys achieved in Afghanistan:

Nothing.

Operation Herrick, the codename under which all British operations in the War in Afghanistan were conducted from 2002 to the end of combat operations in 2014, was an utter failure.

That means that in the last two wars, the British Army has been bested in the field by two Islamist militias-one Shia and the other Sunni.

The first one was, of course, the capitulation in 2007 to the Shi’ite Mehdi Army.

While the Brits “provided overwatch” from the safety of the airfield, the pro-Iranian Shia militia murdered at least 40 women for being, in their eyes, insufficiently Islamic.

As far as the Americans were concerned, the British military had one last chance to retrieve their reputation if they could do the business in Helmand provide against the locals.

They failed again.

Chronically under-resourced the Brits failed abysmally, and the US forces had to step in to save the days as they did in Basra.

Unimpressive.

When President Biden decided to continue with the Trump Administration’s withdrawal plan, then the die was cast.

It means that UK personnel also had to leave as they were only Brit part players in this foreign adventure.

In the Post-Suez, that is always the case despite the delusional nonsense about the “special relationship”.

Now the women and girls of Afghanistan face a new dark age.

Here is a haunting image of liberated women in Kabul in the 1970s before the West decided that their country needed liberation.

In order to inflict a Cold War defeat on the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US Intelligence community outsourced the grunt work to the locals.

The CIA provided them with weapons and crucially emphasised the fact that the invaders were infidels.

Of course, once you get the habit of killing one set of infidels, it is a natural progression to have a go at the biggest infidel of them all, the Great Satan, the USA.

Osma Bin Laden was a CIA trained Saudi.

He used the skills Uncle Sam taught him allowed him to inflict mass casualty attacks on US soil.

The guys at Langley even have a name for this: Blowback.

Going into Afghanistan two decades ago was, of course, a response to 911.

19 men carried out those attacks; 15 of them were Saudis.

Their leader Mohamed Atta was very close to senior members of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service.

Yet Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were valued allies in the “War On Terror”.

Bush administration quickly turned their attention to the real prize-Iraq.

The same stunning ignorance was also in evidence before invading that British confected polity.

In the days before the invasion of Iraq, George W Bush was being briefed  about the sectarian divisions within Saddam’s fiefdom when the 43rd President blurted out, “I thought they were all Muslims?”

The Vietnam intervention ended in US defeat and an ignominious evacuation.

These images haunted  America for a generation.

Today Kabul is Saigon, and this will undoubtedly become the defining image of the entire failed adventure.

On 911, terrified innocent people leapt to their deaths from the burning  World Trade Center.

At Kabul airport, they fell from a US transport plane.

Dear reader, it was too horribly contrived for a novel.

Now the darkness descends on the people of Afghanistan.

It is worth noting that many of the repressive laws and ordinances that the Taliban will now impose there are currently extant in Saudi Arabia.

Somehow that is not a problem for the leaders of the West.