Vietnam and Afghanistan: A tale of two US military withdrawals

1 / 5
Combo image showing a picture of the 1975 fall of Saigon by Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es (left) and a chaotic scene at Kabul airport on August 19, 2021. (Wikimedia Commons and AFP)
Short Url
Updated 06 September 2021
Follow

Vietnam and Afghanistan: A tale of two US military withdrawals

  • US enmity with Vietnam’s communist rulers gave way to frienship and strategic partnership
  • Whether Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and the US can bury their enmity remains to be seen

WASHINGTON D.C.: Images of the chaotic last days of the US mission in Afghanistan have been compared widely to the scenes of the final evacuation from Saigon in 1975 as the victorious North Vietnamese Army rolled into the capital of South Vietnam.

Iconic photos of desperate Vietnamese trying to scale the walls of the US embassy bear a striking resemblance to those of civilians clambering up the gates of Kabul airport last month in hopes of catching one of the last flights out of the country.

In hindsight, the parallels between the American experience in Vietnam and Afghanistan are too many to ignore. Just like the US began a rapid military drawdown in Vietnam after signing the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam in 1973, the February 2020 Doha deal between the US and the Taliban set the scene for America’s rush for the exits in Afghanistan.

By 1975, the only US soldiers remaining in South Vietnam were the Marines who guarded the embassy in Saigon and a small contingent at a nearby air base. By the end of April that year, the city, later renamed Ho Chi Minh City, had fallen to the North VIetnamese Army (NVA).




Jubilant communist troops atop tanks make their way to the center of Saigon as the city fell under their control on April 30, 1975. (Vietnam News Agency photo via AFP) 

The US had hoped that the peace accords would allow for the “Vietnamization” of the conflict, transferring combat operations and security away from the US military to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

But just like the Afghan National Army — in which Washington had invested billions in training and equipment — proved incapable of securing the country on their own, the ARVN crumbled in the absence of the full complement of US ground combat units and field advisers.

For a long time after the humiliating end to the Vietnam War, the US seemed to suffer from a crisis of confidence, questioning its strength, the appeal of its values and its role in the world.

“This will be the final message from Saigon station,” wrote Thomas Polgar, the last serving CIA station chief in Saigon, before his evacuation. “It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the US, does not signal, necessarily, the demise of the US as a world power.”

He added: “Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off.”




Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, to flee the country as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. (AFP file)

American military historians would be right to assess that the lessons of Vietnam were lost when the US pursued another open-ended war whose initial limited objectives were overtaken by a zeal for nation-building.

As with Saigon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the government in Kabul supported by the US military lacked the competence and broad legitimacy to combat an insurgency on its own.

In a now declassified 1969 memo to former president Richard Nixon, his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, expressed deep concern that the war was unlikely to be won militarily.

“I am not optimistic about the ability of the South Vietnamese armed forces to assume a larger part of the burden than current plans allow,” he wrote, adding: “Hanoi’s adoption of a strategy designed to wait us out fits both with its doctrine of how to fight a revolutionary war and with its expectations about increasingly significant problems for the US.”

In both the Vietnam and Afghanistan missions, time and lack of strategic patience were America’s main weaknesses in the face of a stubborn insurgency. Of the four different administrations that have guided US foreign policy since the Afghan war began, none took a step back to assess the likelihood of success as rationally and impartially as Kissinger did in the 1969 memo.

Although the Afghanistan mission did not produce the kind of civil disturbance and political turmoil synonymous with the Vietnam War, there was a broad consensus among US politicians for some time now that an indefinite military involvement in the culturally distant Central Asian country was not desirable.

Now that the Afghanistan chapter is closed, some point to the fact that the post-1975 period has seen a slow but remarkable rapprochement between the US and Vietnam.

Within the space of 20 years, the former belligerent nations were able to forge a relationship that today has evolved into a veritable strategic partnership, symbolized by the US-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership of 2013.

A quarter of a century after the establishment of bilateral relations in 1995, the US and Vietnam are thus partners with a friendship grounded in mutual respect and suspicion of China’s geopolitical motives.

The partnership now spans political, economic, security and people-to-people ties. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese citizens study in the US and contribute almost $1 billion to the US economy.

“We must remember that the immediate consequences of the Vietnam War were horrible. Many in South Vietnam were sent to camps and murdered, resulting in a huge human-rights tragedy,” James Carafano, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Arab News. “Today, Vietnam is a different place. Vietnamese are terrified of China and they need the US to defend them.”

A strong, prosperous and independent Vietnam is very much in Washington’s interest as Hanoi and Beijing remain locked in a standoff over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Bilateral trade between the two nations has grown from $451 million in 1995 to more than $90 billion in 2020. US goods exports to Vietnam were worth more than $10 billion in 2020, while imports were worth a whopping $79.6 billion. US investment in Vietnam touched $2.6 billion in 2019.




Vietnam's exports to the US swelled over the past decade. (Reuters file photo)

Now that the war in Afghanistan is over and discussions between the Taliban and regional countries toward diplomatic normalization are ongoing, the evolution of US-Vietnamese relations from enmity to a flourishing partnership can prove instructive.

Could economic leverage, common security interests and deft diplomacy achieve in Afghanistan what the expenditure of billions of dollars in building a defense force in the mold of Western militaries failed to do?

The Taliban have been keen to signal that they are ready to engage diplomatically with regional powers, including China, the Arab Gulf states, Turkey and even India.

For the US, the immediate security objective is to make sure that neither Al-Qaeda nor Daesh establishes a base of operations to plot transnational terror attacks from. To this end, the US will have to make use of all the tools at its disposal: Soft power, diplomacy and economic incentives.

The worst-case scenario at the time of the 1975 US defeat was a communist victory in South Vietnam having a “domino effect,” leading to the collapse of Southeast Asian governments allied with the US. But such an eventuality did not come to fruition.

The dramatic turnaround in US-Vietnam relations means there is room for hope in the case of Afghanistan, too, but with a number of caveats.

“There were two reasons why the US remained in Afghanistan: One, to prevent another space for transnational terror again, and two, to prevent the destabilization of South Asia. Both were legitimate US interests,” said Carafano.

“Now we have no presence, no visibility on the terrorist situation and no deterrent against actors in the region. We have lost the trust of allies.”

As for the future, Carafano said: “The Taliban are not going through an evolution like Germany post-Second World War. It’s a ridiculous notion that the Taliban will normalize as a government. Daesh are useful idiots who do not have the capacity to threaten anybody. They are a bigger threat to the Taliban than to us.

“Will the Taliban break with the Haqqani network and Al-Qaeda? They won’t. The Taliban may not plan the next 9/11, but Al-Qaeda and Haqqani will.”




In this photo taken on May 31, 2017, Afghan security forces stand at the site of a deadly explosion blamed on the Haqqani network. (AP file)

Clearly, the time-worn tribal partnership between the Haqqani network, which is an integral part of the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, will be a major complicating factor in the Taliban’s ability or willingness to prevent the international terror group from rebounding.

For the moment, the Taliban seem to be making all the right noises. The political leadership has emphasized that they are pursuing a nationalist vision, not a transnational one.

What remains to be seen is whether the group can prioritize the needs of running the affairs of state, which will require significant outside financial support and technical expertise, over a wild-eyed “revolutionary” vision that includes terror sanctuaries.

“In Vietnam, military victory over the US did not translate to a strategic defeat of the US and the anti-communist bloc globally,” Carafano told Arab News.

“Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken successive steps toward strengthening Washington’s commitment to a security partnership with Vietnam. Previously unthinkable, US Navy aircraft carriers are now allowed to dock in Vietnamese ports.




US Vice President Kamala Harris meets with Vietnam's Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh din Hanoi on August 25, 2021. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/Pool)

“Whether the US and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan can develop some level of security arrangement based on a common threat perception is an open-ended question.

“But already, China and Russia have signaled that they are ready for a bigger role in Afghanistan in the wake of the US withdrawal. Though they are likely to engage cautiously. Both powers’ interest in Afghanistan lies in winning without fighting. But they’ll take their time in Afghanistan.”

In the final analysis, time was the overarching factor in America’s military defeat by the insurgency in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it also was the passage of time following the Vietnam War that enabled the adversaries to grow into friends based on common interests and threats.

It remains to be seen what American policymakers have learnt from the two humiliating withdrawals in order to avoid a third. With Vietnam, the US was able to salvage a measure of diplomatic victory from its military defeat. In Afghanistan, much will depend on the Taliban leadership’s ability and willingness to make a complete break with the past.

_______________

Twitter: @OS26


Australian political leaders launch election campaigns focused on first-time homeowners

Updated 22 sec ago
Follow

Australian political leaders launch election campaigns focused on first-time homeowners

MELBOURNE: Australia’s rival political leaders offered Sunday competing policies to help Australians buy a home ahead of the nation’s first federal election in which younger voters will outnumber the long-dominant baby boomer generation.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton officially launched their parties’ campaigns ahead of the May 3 elections.

Helping aspiring homeowners buy into a national real estate market in which prices are high and supply is constrained due to inflation, builders going broke, shortages of materials and a growing population was central to both campaigns.

“Buying a first home has never been easy, but for this generation, it’s never felt further out of reach,” Albanese told his supporters in the west coast city of Perth.

“In Australia, home ownership should not be a privilege you inherit if you’re lucky. It should be an aspiration that Australians everywhere can achieve,” he added.

The governing center-left Labor Party promised Sunday 10 billion Australian dollars ($6.3 billion) in grants and loans to build 100,000 new homes over eight years exclusively for first-homebuyers, who would only have to pay a 5 percent deposit instead of the current minimum 20 percent, with the government paying the remainder.

Opposition promises to reduce housing demand

Dutton’s conservative Liberal Party promised to ease demand for housing by banning foreign investors and temporary residents from buying existing homes for two years while reducing immigration and foreign student numbers.


Spain busts ring bringing Moroccans in via Romania

Updated 4 min 6 sec ago
Follow

Spain busts ring bringing Moroccans in via Romania

MADRID: Spanish police said on Sunday they had broken a ring that had brought in up to 2,500 Moroccan irregular immigrants via Romania, arresting four suspects.

The four were detained in the southeastern Murcia province on charges of belonging to a criminal organization and facilitating irregular migration, the Guardia Civil said in a statement.

The Moroccans entered Europe by plane to Romania, from where they were transported to Spain, with each one charged 3,000 euros ($3,400) for the voyage, it said. The suspects were alleged to be the ringleaders of the organization. Their nationalities were not specified.

Spanish authorities believe the ring organized 50 such trips over the past two years, each one composed of between 20 and 50 Moroccans, making for a total of between 1,000 and 2,500 irregular immigrants.

The outfit was alleged to have a “logistics center” in Romania where it hid the migrants while they awaited their transport to Spain.

The Guardia Civil said the operation to bust the ring was conducted with the help of Europol and the European Union’s border patrol agency Frontex.


Dozens reported killed in east Congo as government, rebels trade blame

Updated 8 min 9 sec ago
Follow

Dozens reported killed in east Congo as government, rebels trade blame

  • Renewed fighting has killed some 3,000 people and worsened one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises

GOMA: At least 50 people were killed in weekend attacks in Congo’s conflict-battered east, authorities said Saturday. The government traded blame with Rwanda-backed rebels over who was responsible for the violence that quickly escalated the conflict in the region.

The renewed violence that residents reported in and around the region’s largest city of Goma — which the M23 rebels control — was the biggest threat yet to ongoing peace efforts by both the Gulf Arab state of Qatar and African nations in the conflict that has raised fears of regional warfare.

Goma resident Amboma Safari recounted how his family of four spent the night under their bed as they heard gunfire and bomb blasts through Friday night. “We saw corpses of soldiers, but we don’t know which group they are from,” Safari said.

The decades-long conflict between Congo and the M23 rebels escalated in January, when the rebels made an unprecedented advance and seized the strategic eastern Congolese city of Goma, followed by the town of Bukavu in February. 

The latest fighting has killed some 3,000 people and worsened what was already one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with around 7 million people displaced.

At least 52 people were killed between Friday and Saturday, including a person shot dead at Goma’s Kyeshero Hospital, Congo’s Ministry of Interior said in a statement that blamed the attack on M23.

M23 spokesperson Lawrence Kanyuka issued a statement blaming Congolese forces and their allies for the attacks. Kanyuka said Congo’s joint operations with local militias and southern African troops “directly threaten the stability and security of civilians” in the region.

The group said it has been compelled to “reconsider its position to prioritize the security” of the people in the area, suggesting the crisis could worsen. Christian Kalamo, a civil society leader in the North Kivu province that includes Goma, said at least one body was seen on the streets on Saturday.

“It is difficult to know if it is the Wazalendo, the FARDC (Congolese forces) or the M23” that carried out the attacks, Kalamo said. “Now, we don’t know what will happen, and we live with fear in our stomachs, thinking that the war will resume.”


Tanzania opposition party barred from upcoming elections

Updated 13 min 19 sec ago
Follow

Tanzania opposition party barred from upcoming elections

DAR ES SALAAM: Tanzania’s main opposition party has been disqualified from upcoming general elections, the country’s election chief said, after it refused to sign an electoral code of conduct.

The east African nation has increasingly cracked down on its opposition ahead of a general election due in October.

The opposition Chadema party has accused President Samia Suluhu Hassan of returning to the repressive tactics of her predecessor, John Magufuli.

Chadema leader Tundu Lissu, who was arrested and charged with treason earlier in the week, previously said that his party would not participate in the polls without electoral reform.

On Saturday, Chadema said the party’s secretary-general John Mnyika would not attend an Independent National Elections Commission meeting to sign the government’s electoral code of conduct.

The decision was “informed by the lack of a written response” to the party’s “proposal and demands for essential electoral reforms,” it said in a statement.

INEC Director of Elections Ramadhani Kailima said following the meeting that “any party that hasn’t signed today will not be allowed to take part in the general election or any other elections for the next five years.” “There will be no second chance,” he told reporters.

He did not mention Chadema by name, and the party has not commented on the INEC’s decision.

Tanzania is scheduled to hold presidential and national assembly elections in October.

President Hassan’s party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi swept to victory in local elections last year.

Chadema said those elections had been manipulated, and that it would petition the high court to demand reforms ahead of the upcoming polls.

Lissu last year warned that Chadema would “block the elections through confrontation” unless the electoral system was reformed.

The opposition’s demands have been long ignored by the ruling party.

Hassan was initially feted for easing restrictions imposed by Magufuli on the opposition and the media in the country of 67 million people.

But rights groups and Western governments have criticized what they see as renewed repression, with the arrests of Chadema politicians as well as abductions and murders of opposition figures.


Bangladesh reintroduces ‘except Israel’ phrase on passports

Protesters condemn Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, at a rally in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saturday, April 12.
Updated 13 April 2025
Follow

Bangladesh reintroduces ‘except Israel’ phrase on passports

  • Israel is a flashpoint issue in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which does not recognize it
  • In 2021, the words “except Israel” were removed from passports

DHAKA: Bangladesh has restored an “except Israel” inscription on passports, local media reported Sunday, effectively barring its citizens from traveling to that country.
Israel is a flashpoint issue in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which does not recognize it.
The phrase “valid for all countries except Israel,” which was printed on Bangladeshi passports for decades, was removed during the later years of ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s tenure.
Nilima Afroze, a deputy secretary at the home ministry, told Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) news agency on Sunday that authorities had “issued a directive last week” to restore the inscription.
“The director general of the department of immigration and passport was asked to take necessary measures to implement this change,” local newspaper The Daily Star quoted Afroze as saying Sunday.
In 2021, the words “except Israel” were removed from passports, although the then government under Hasina clarified that the country’s stance on Israel had not changed.
The country’s support for an independent Palestinian state was visible on Saturday when around 100,000 people gathered in Dhaka in solidarity with Gaza.
The Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
A fragile ceasefire between the warring parties fell apart last month and Gaza’s health ministry said Sunday that at least 1,574 Palestinians had been killed since then, taking the overall death toll since the war began to 50,944.