On April 30, 1975, the last few Americans still in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin accepted the surrender of South Vietnam later in the day. The Vietnam War was the longest -20 years- and most unpopular foreign war in U.S. history and cost 58,000 American lives. As many as two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed. The U.S. military was sent to Vietnam to protect the United States and the world against the spread of dirty, nasty Communism. See, back then, there was this thing called the Domino Theory that suggested that other nations throughout Asia would become satellites of either the Soviet Union or Communist China, much like nations in Eastern Europe had come under Soviet domination. So the United States spent upwards of $168 billion over 20 years to make sure Vietnam didn't become a communist county. And, guess what, despite all the time, effort, and money, it did -pretty much immediately after the US left.
Let me stop right here. Does any of this sound even vaguely familiar to what just occurred in Afghanistan? It should. 4,500 American (military and contractor) lives lost, more than $2 trillion spent over 20 years, and as soon as the U.S. military pulls out, the country falls to the very regime we went in to oust 20 years ago. Only now they have lots of brand new military equipment left behind by the U.S. military. Oh, and new roads and infrastructure too! Nice, huh?
And now everyone is looking for someone to blame for all this and President Biden is the easy, obvious choice. It's a severely short-sited, uninformed, and stupid choice, but it's an easy one, for sure. The truth is the civilian and military leadership of the United States spanning the last 20+ years are all collectively to blame for what has unfolded in Afghanistan. They're all definitely to blame for disregarding history and what happened in Vietnam over 40 years ago and not learning a damned thing from all those lives and dollars lost so many years ago. Afghanistan is pretty much a carbon copy of what happened in Vietnam. The U.S. made the same bone-headed mistakes from the get-go. Mistake number 1? Putting boots on the ground there in the first place. Politicians and military folks involved in the decision to go to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan will paint you a pretty picture of all the valid and just reasons we went over there, but at the end of the day, it came down to only one reason: revenge. Osama bin Laden pulled off a brazen and devastating attack on U.S. soil that was a huge, out-of-nowhere slap in the face to all Americans. The most frustrating part of the attack is that all of the terrorists involved ended up dying along with all the innocent victims. We had no one to prosecute and put in jail! We needed justice! Well, Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of the attack and he was still alive, so we'd just got get his ass! Obviously that proved harder than anyone ever imagined. But instead of trying to catch this dude by dialing down the rhetoric and quietly, patiently using our Intelligence Community and Special Forces to track him under the radar, we decided the best course of action was to just punish anyone who wasn't cooperating with our search for him. Even if that meant invading an entire country -a country which the Soviet Union had tried and failed miserably to conquer decades before- and overthrowing the Taliban government to be replaced by a propped-up American-controlled puppet government. Here's the kicker: after 10 years of searching, Osama bin Laden was finally killed... IN PAKISTAN!!!
I saw the end result of this Afghanistan debacle from day one. Many, many people did. And yet, here we are. All of our dead soldiers are turning over in their graves in disbelief. All of our wounded heroes are scratching their heads and pounding their fists. All of our Afghanistan allies who bought into the American-flavored dream for their country are now abandoned to fend for themselves. And our political and military leaders continue to deny and deflect the blame. Now it becomes a big blame game between the two major political parties. It's almost an impossible dream at this point given our inability to learn from our past mistakes throughout history, but I really truly hope we learn something this time. After this blame game has played itself out and the historians record (hopefully) what really happened and why. Maybe the next generation of political and military leaders will be smarter and wiser. I know; that's a tall order when you're dealing with such a huge American ego that seems to influence every aspect of our foreign policy these days.
But hey, in the meantime, let's all blame Biden.
Comments
Post a Comment