A temporary end to America's endless war

Our intervention in Afghanistan ends; the empire lives on

For those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War’s ignominious conclusion, yesterday’s sudden collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul was eerily reminiscent of the fall of Saigon.

The media is calling the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, begun just days after 9/11, as America’s longest war. But if we measure the U.S. intervention in Vietnam from President Eisenhower’s decision in 1954 not to honor the Geneva Accords to the collapse of the U.S.-backed Thieu regime in 1975, that deceitful enterprise went on for nearly 21 years, one year longer than Afghanistan. It also killed 20 times more American soldiers, not to mention the estimated two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

But the takeaway lesson from both misadventures is the same. No foreign power, even one with the most technologically advanced military in the world, can force its will on an independence-minded people, no matter how undemocratic, destructive or distasteful their ideology.

In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party fought for independence for decades, first from France and then from the U.S. America’s leaders, blinded by a knee-jerk, anti-communist ideology, ignored that country’s long history of fighting foreign domination (ironically, mostly from the Chinese to their immediate north, with whom they went briefly to war just four years after America’s final withdrawal). No amount of American guns and money would have defeated that country’s “peasant nationalism,” to use the late Chalmers Johnson’s memorable formulation.

The same holds true for the mujahudeen that populate the isolated villages of rural Afghanistan. They fought and defeated the British. They fought and defeated the Russians (with our help — let’s not forget that Osama bin Laden once fought on our side). It was only the hunt for bin Laden after 9/11 that allowed us to temporarily dislodge the Taliban from power.

And now, 20 years and a trillion dollars later, America adds its name to the empires defeated in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. What part of Afghanistan’s history, religion or culture suggested a majority in that economically backwards country would embrace an American-imposed vision of freedom and democracy?

My heart goes out to the all the families of the soldiers and civilians who paid the ultimate price in this latest chapter in the decline and fall of the American empire. They did their duty, and, as was said many times by the leaders of the anti-Vietnam war movement, soldiers should not be blamed for carrying out the misconceived policies and directions of their political and military leaders. The dead included more than 3,500 soldiers in the U.S.-led coalition (two-thirds of whom were Americans); 51,000 Afghan civilians; and 69,000 Afghan security forces. An estimated 51,000 Taliban and other militants also died.

We can honor their sacrifices by always remembering it didn’t have to happen.

I worry about the fates of all the honest people who worked with the Americans and in the Kabul government. I lament the fates of women and children who will now be subjected to the barbaric dictates of the Taliban regime.

But if there is a line in the sands of barbarism that great powers can’t let other countries cross (as Samantha Powers argued in calling for U.S. intervention in Bosnia in the mid-1990s), where is it? This past year, did the military regime in Myanmar cross it? Did the Chinese government cross it in Xinjiang with the Uighurs or in Hong Kong with its crackdown on peaceful democracy demonstrators? Did the Rwandan government cross it during its 1994 civil war with the murder of a half million or more Tutsis?

The massive antiwar movement that forced an end to the war in Vietnam had the beneficial effect of temporarily limiting the U.S.’s ability to intervene abroad. It led President Reagan to engage in a surreptitious plot to funnel arms to the Contras fighting against the Sandanista government in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra scandal).

But in the late fall of 1990, Congress authorized a war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. military cheered finally kicking “Vietnam syndrome.”

I’m afraid given all the geopolitical instability that will emerge over the next decade as climate change disrupts weather, crops and living conditions across the globe, “Afghanistan syndrome” — as ably articulated by President Biden in recent weeks — will have an even shorter shelf life.