AUGUST 17, 2021 – During a recent trip to Home Depot, we loaded a cart with several items manufactured in Vietnam. These prompted me to think about the intractable Vietnam War and our ignoble exit from the country in 1975. Those of us who were old enough to have noticed remember the Fall of Saigon, symbolized starkly by the photo of a CIA officer helping scores of South Vietnamese evacuees up a roof-top ladder to small American helicopter.
Now comes the Fall of Kabul.
Media outlets and critics of President Biden are apoplectic in their reaction. The photographic “2021 in Review” will certainly include an image of the C-17 chased down the runway by a horde of Afghan men (pity the women in hiding) desperate to escape the Taliban. Despite today’s drama, like the Fall of Vietnam, soon the Fall of Afghanistan will be forgotten by the American electorate. Unlike Vietnam, however, Afghanistan won’t be manufacturing anything sold at Home Depot—unless the chain store becomes “Heroin Depot.”
I don’t know enough about Biden’s tactical options to judge his tactical decisions. Did he screw up big time or little time? Only play-by-play analysis combined with the perspective of time will tell. I’m confident, however, that Biden’s strategic decision will prove to be the right one.
As an American voter, I’m woefully ignorant of the place into which we poured so much blood and treasure (and irresponsibly oblivious to the corruption behind the sacrifices). I do know, however, that it’s a place of warlords and tribalism fostered by geographic isolation; a place where the mighty British Empire stumbled badly and the powerful Soviet Union met humiliating defeat; a place that the young American reporter William Shirer described in 1930 as ungovernable. (Upon learning of Shirer’s travel plans to Afghanistan, a British colonial official warned, “Your life wouldn’t be worth a rupee in that wild place.”)
I remember in year four of the Afghan War meeting a National Guardsman on leave at a resort in Jamaica. He told of an impossible mission in a land where prevailing values conflicted harshly with American norms. While guarding Taliban prisoners, he learned as much as he could about them. Their main trait: they themselves took no prisoners. For them, the fight was Allah’s fight, and all in Allah’s fight was right.
Aboard the Trans-Siberian Railroad almost 20 years earlier, I asked many ordinary Russians about Afghanistan—less than two years into their 10-year adventure in the “Graveyard of Empires.” Invariably, the Russians answered, “CШA [USA]—Vietnam; CCCP [USSR]—Afghanistan.”
If we don’t, won’t, and can’t control our own home-grown Taliban (zealots who would impose their will on the rest of us), how on earth can we control the Taliban a world away? In deciding to keep, eat, or toss food from the fridge, if the food’s gone bad, there’s only one viable choice. Sadly, the dear price paid for the now rotten fruit mustn’t be a factor.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
