Pundits are currently rushing to their keyboards to write pieces pointing out how America's departure from Afghanistan is eerily similar to our departure from Vietnam in the 1970s. In their many breathless words, they will not be wrong. There are many similarities between our exit from these two conflicts.
Of great importance will be the many veterans left to deal with the emotional impact of leaving pieces of themselves on the battlefield in a cause that was ultimately abandoned because their fellow citizens failed to muster sufficient support. They lost friends on the battlefield. They lost friends to suicide on the other battlefield of emotions that follow when they came home. They lost pieces of themselves overseas and now our nation has said that this wasn't a worthwhile endeavor.
This is not necessarily a partisan issue. Or at least it shouldn't be regardless of the many people that will try to make it one. President GW Bush famously shifted focus to Iraq and away from Afghanistan. President Obama's anti-colonial mindset largely precluded him from mounting a truly effective strategy at ending the Taliban/al-Qaida presence in the region. To be honest, both men did far more good in Afghanistan than their detractors will ever give them credit.
President Trump campaigned in part on supporting the military but also on getting us out of the Middle East. It is an odd combination when one considers that the military and the veterans of a conflict genuinely want to win. In any case, Mr. Trump began voicing a policy preference for leaving Afghanistan regardless of the conditions on the ground.
President Biden is completing the arc. Our Afghani allies have been abandoned. The Taliban has already begun the process of restoring their cultural diktats on a populace that really wanted to live more freely than was possible before our invasion of their country. Members of the Afghani military are being murdered. Our translators and their families are being slaughtered. Young girls are being forcibly taken as brides by Taliban fighters.
Most of those breathless columns will seek to shame America for daring to wade into yet another military conflict. They will point out how we have wasted blood and treasure in another pointless military escapade.
They will be wrong.
In Marine boot camp, many years ago, we were taught some very (very) basic hand-to-hand fighting techniques. One of those was called the "pillow of death". Essentially, one arm crossed in front of someone's throat and was locked in place by the other hand. In combat, you were then supposed to throw them to the ground so that the combination of your shoulder pressing on the back of their head and your forearm across the front of their neck would cause the neck to break. In training, you put a knee in the middle of their back so that you could practice the handhold without risking your partner's life.
A few years later I found myself taking another Marine home. He was drunk. I didn't know it at the time, but he was an unreasonable drunk. One might even say a mean drunk.
He had not told his wife where he was going that evening. It was a celebration for a friend that had been accepted for promotion to warrant officer. She was pissed when we got to his home. She also lacked the wisdom to know that harping at a drunkard was the least productive way of dealing with the situation.
Arguing led to shouting. Several times in a row I talked him down and had him pointed towards bed. Several times in a row, she started in on him again.
Eventually, he took a swing at her. He found himself with my knee in his back and my forearm across his neck whispering in his ear that he really needed to calm down and just go to bed.
He calmed down. We talked for a while. I thought he had his mind right. So even though his wife wanted me to stay, we walked to the door and I foolishly left. The bolt clicked home and he screamed his wife's name.
Fortunately, she had gotten the kids out while he and I were talking at the door.
This is not a memory that I'd like to keep, but I suspect it will be with me for some time to come. I ultimately failed that night.
The point is that in that moment of time, he had precisely two desires. The first was to be out of sight of witnesses. The second was to really hurt his wife.
Those twin desires are also present in much larger groups.
For close to two decades, the American military supported the people of Southeast Asia who did not want to live under the subjugation of a socialist/communist government. They might not have wanted to be an Asian mirror of Western Europe or the United States. They also didn't want the poverty, oppression, and murder that were the inevitable result of collectivist governments.
For that brief span, the American military were the shield; they held back the tide. And while a victorious peace was never realized, what those people had was better than submission to the communists.
I have friends that were in Vietnam for Tet. They will vociferously point out that we were winning when they left. And the truth is that we were. Vietnamese military and civilian leaders confirmed decades later that they lacked the capability to win a military conflict against the United States. They simply held on until our anti-war movement could persuade our politicians to abandon Southeast Asia.
When we left, those innocent civilians were left alone at the hands of a group that had two great desires. The first was to be left alone with their pending victims. The second was to commit great harm upon people whose only crime was daring to disagree with their socialist/communist abusers.
Roughly 600,000 to 800,000 Vietnamese were murdered by the communists after we left Vietnam. Roughly 2,000,000 Cambodians were murdered by that nation's communists.
We are about to witness the same thing in Afghanistan. The Taliban will return to stoning people before soccer matches for various offenses. Women will be forced to cover themselves from head to toe. They will be denied basic education. They will be raped.
And I believe it likely that Al-Qaida will rebuild their training camps and indoctrination centers. Terrorism will have another safe haven.
Staying in Afghanistan would have been bloody, painful, and expensive. It would never have become something akin to a modern Western democratic state. But an Afghani government supported by the west was better than the alternative.
In leaving, we offer the Islamists their deepest desire. They are left alone with their victims. They are free to brutalize them, rape them, and murder them with impunity.
Such brutality was the norm before we arrived. It will become the norm again because we have left.
Anyone that advocated leaving should spend the next several years watching what happens in Afghanistan. The bitter harvest that is about to occur is the direct result of their policy preferences.
