I vividly recall the fall of Saigon in 1975 as the ARVN collapsed and the North Vietnamese swept into South Vietnam in a perfectly conventional military attack, complete with tanks, a far cry from two decades of guerilla warfare.

It was the first “current affairs news” that I ever took notice of. But then the images were unforgettable: ARVN pilots escaping with their families using any helicopter they could get their hands on, landing on any US warship with deck space; American sailors pushing the machines over the side to make room for more; other choppers landing in the sea.

The best documentary of this event is the 2014 PBS special, Last Days in Vietnam. A terrifying, heartbreaking, gripping movie that you will not regret watching. The title of this post is a quote from one of the Americans involved in that evacuation.

I don’t think we’re going to see anything quite like that from Afghanistan. The cartoon above is actually from 2009, when hopes were high that newly elected President Barack Obama would withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan since, after all, eight years was surely enough.

A decade later hopes were also high that President Trump would withdraw from that benighted tribal land, but like Bush and Obama, he allowed himself to be convinced by the State Department and the Pentagon that the USA needed to stay a while longer, lest the Afghanistan Army and government collapse.

If they were likely to collapse after almost two decades of American training and about $1 trillion of invested effort and resources, then what difference was another four years going to make? Even a decade ago these sorts of arguments had begun to have uncanny similarities to South Vietnam circa 1973-75.

There was also a nasty little pressure campaign launched by insiders in the Intelligence and Military, to the effect that dreaded Russians were paying bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops. It was total shite and obviously so from the start, given that the Taliban were only too happy to do that job for free. But it was designed to mesh perfectly with the Trump-Russia delusion; if Trump pulled out from Afghanistan it could only be because he was doing what the Russians wanted. How much that campaign played in Trump’s decision to respect the Pentagon’s wishes is not known.

Finally, earlier this year President Biden directed the US to leave, they have almost completely done so, and the Vietnam scenario that so many foresaw has begun. You’re going to soon see – probably in less than a month – similar cartoons to the one above, judging by these sorts of news headlines:

To get a picture of the acceleration of this destruction I present you with the Washington Post’s exposition of the predictions from the Best and The Brightest on August 11:

The Biden administration is preparing for Afghanistan’s capital to fall far sooner than feared only weeks ago, as a rapid disintegration of security has prompted the revision of an already stark intelligence assessment predicting Kabul could be overrunwithin six to 12 months of the U.S. military departing, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

By August 13 there’d been an update:

A new U.S. intelligence assessment has indicated Kabul could be overrun within 30 to 90 days.

Now:

It’s stuff like this that causes me to have some sympathy for President Biden when he said this weeks ago:

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Biden is as stupid a President as the US has ever had; bag of rocks dumb even before he grew senile, which is why he allowed himself to mouth that advice given to him by the same agencies that failed to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, the collapse of the Eastern European Communist Bloc, and the 9/11 attacks.

By contrast many ordinary people, across the ideological and political spectrum around the world, without access to the “intelligence” and lacking PhD’s in Foreign Policy, have predicted this collapse for years now.

As such we should not let those “experts” off the hook and yet we have. Almost two years ago the Washington Post, – for once doing some real investigative journalism – and in yet another eerie echo of Vietnam, published The Afghanistan Papers, which detailed the failures of the US in that country and the lies that had been told to President’s Bush and Obama about the progress being made in Afghanistan and that the war was still worth fighting.

The papers were based on a series of massive internal investigations done by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), created in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone. But the agency ended up going much further than that with a project called “Lessons Learned” that ran through 2015:

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

The reports were packed with bureaucratic language, but it was the interviews, with 90% of the people promised anonymity, that hit hard. Only a few were prepared to go on the record. Here are just two:

‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doin’, Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: ‘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’ Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. ‘Who will say this was in vain?’
…
‘Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible’ Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. ‘Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone’.

Is it any wonder that the WaPo had to spend three years, including two lawsuits filed against SIGAR, to get access to such information:

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

Yet the radioactive fallout from these reports inside the Pentagon, State Department, CIA and other US Federal government institutions dealing with Afghanistan, has been non-existent.

That should not be a surprise given that the information fell upon the deaf ears of the American public, who apparently didn’t give a shit.

Certainly there was, and remains, an element of wishful thinking from those who listened to such lies, as president Bush demonstrated just the other day with these comments.

“It’s unbelievable how that society changed from the brutality of the Taliban, and all of a sudden — sadly — I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm. I’m sad. Laura and I spent a lot of time with Afghan women, and they’re scared. And I think about all the interpreters and people that helped not only U.S. troops but NATO troops, and it seems like they’re just going to be left behind to be slaughtered by these very brutal people. And it breaks my heart.”

My feelings on Bush are summed up by a couple of comments:

I don’t care how George Bush feels about Afghan girls. Did any members of the Bush family die or suffer catastrophic injury to protect those girls. How many U.S. men and women was he willing to sacrifice so that he didn’t feel bad about the plight of Afghan girls?”
…
“Bush can spare us all the sob stories. He had eight years to establish the conditions for success in Afghanistan, and he didn’t….for eight years he let the CIA and State Department continually screw up and fail in their missions without any consequences, beginning with 9/11. 

Let me make it quite clear that I supported the initial invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In fact I saw no choice but to take out the Al Qaeda base camps, and if that meant the Taliban government also fell, then too bad.

That was done in a matter of months, but when I began to read stories about the likes of Bush and “Pottery Barn” Powell (“You break it. You buy it”) talking about setting up a democratic government there and building a “civil society” I absolutely disagreed.

Afghanistan is and always has been less a nation than a place of warring tribes. The idea of turning it into even an approximation of a civil society, even by the low standard of various Gulf States, seemed crazy to me. Were these people not aware of the history of Britain in two 19th century wars there, plus the USSR in the 1980’s? Here’s Churchill writing in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, of the different policy options for Britain in the 1890’s:

The “Full steam ahead” method would be undoubtedly the most desirable.  This is the military view.  Mobilise, it is urged, a nice field force, and operate at leisure in the frontier valleys, until they are as safe as Hyde Park.  Nor need this course necessarily involve the extermination of the inhabitants.  Military rule is the best rule suited to the character and comprehension of the tribesmen.  They will soon recognize the futility of resistance, and will gradually welcome the increase of wealth and comfort that will follow a stable government.
…
Only one real objection has been advanced against this plan. But it is a crushing one, and it constitutes the most serious argument against the whole “Forward Policy.”  It is this: we have neither the troops nor the money to carry it out.

If they had not read Churchill – and I recall that he was all the rage with the Bush Whitehouse – surely they had read Kipling’s war poetry:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.

The likes of Bush claimed that they were aware of such history. Not just Bush but Obama-loving voices like David Brooks in the NYT, writing of spreading progressive values, because:

“at their core the liberal powers radiate a set of vital ideals — not just democracy and capitalism, but also feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice.”

FFS!. Insane. Quite utterly insane, and now here is the result of that insanity staring us in the face.

Having said that, and even holding Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump responsible for what they failed to do in Afghanistan, there’s no question that Biden has fucked this up badly.

For a start, he announced the order to withdraw in Spring – right at the start of the annual fighting season, when the Taliban are always gearing up to fight. Had he waited until Winter the Afghanistan government and military would have had six months to prepare to fight on their own.

In other “Lessons Not Learned”, according to the Wall Street Journal article:

“… about 5,000 civilians and military personnel are based at the embassy and Hamid Karzai International Airport.”

What the hell are 5,000 people still doing at the American embassy and airport offices? Can they be extracted? Apparently Biden has sent some 5000 US Marines and soldiers back in for that reason. Will they be able to extract the even greater numbers of Afghanis who helped the USA for years? There are more than 18,000 of them still in the country. They could have, and should have, been evacuated starting back in May. How hard can that be: you land planes, put people in them, and fly them out?

Finally, Biden has been reduced to pitiful displays of “diplomacy” and “military actions”:

  • Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. diplomat who negotiated a withdrawal deal with the Taliban last year, is back in Doha, Qatar, desperately trying to cobble together some kind of face-saving agreement for the Afghan government that would allow them to leave the country alive…Khalilzad will press for “a reduction of violence and ceasefire and a commitment not to recognize a government imposed by force,” and will urge the “Taliban to stop their military offensive.”
  • American B-52H bombers are understood to be conducting an attack on the largest Afghan air force base in order to destroy the aircraft based there. “They don’t want A-29B & AC-208B attack aircraft remain in hands of Taliban.”
  • Press Secretary Jen Psaki: “The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.”
  • State Department spokesman Ned Price:  “If this violence continues, if the Taliban continues down this path, we are likely to see a prolonged, protracted period of violence, of instability, and that is not in anyone’s interest.”

FFS! Like the North Vietnamese in 1975, the Taliban’s only interest is in victory.

In this Biden is unified with the equally useless and pathetic creatures of NATO and the EU, who have threatened the Taliban with “isolation” if they seize power.

You have to laugh or you’d cry.

Over on the US Powerline blog, Paul Mirengoff, made the following statement:

“Great nations don’t betray entire populations or the sacrifices of their own servicemen.”

Oh yes they do, Paul. They have always done so, and you as a former Vietnam War protestor should know that better than most. All we can hope for now is something less than a bloodbath. The following woo is not encouraging.