Take Me Home, Afghani Roads
It’s been a week since the AP snapped pictures of a Chinook helicopter descending past the rooftops of Kabul, calling to mind the not-so-subtle imagery of Saigon’s jumbled evacuation forty-six years ago. A lot of commentators will focus on this point and draw apt comparisons between what is apparently the close of America’s involvement in Afghanistan and the end of our presence in Vietnam.
The comparisons seem appropriate at face value. Both were humiliating withdrawals from nations that looked to us to support them during a crisis period. Both punctuated a long-standing military engagement whose involvement had most average Americans scratching their heads. Both were uncertain conflicts popularly defined by images of guerrilla conflict in uncertain and unpleasant environments, and against enemies that pundits would like to dismiss as backwards farmers with AKs, had they not been so effective.
It’s worth a brief ironic note that the evacuation of Saigon stood closer in time to the victorious confetti of V-E day, May 8th 1945, than the present day stands to Saigon. It took about a generation from the end of the Great War’s sequel before the cultural revolution swallowed the West in the 1960s. And yet, despite half again the number of years separating American abandonment operations of Kabul and Saigon, there are more common themes to be found.
Yet again, the 1960s, far from a mere shadow cast upon the last fifty years, reveals the revolution to have been a break with the past so thorough as to render history before it as almost that of a foreign country. The United States that won WWII was not the one that retreated from the soon-to-be-dubbed Ho Chi Minh City, but—differences aside—there’s a clear continuity found from the Southeast Asian rooftops of 1975 and the now-barricaded Kabul airport.
Rather than dwell on superficial comparisons, however, we should take this revolution into account. The war in Afghanistan was a lot different from the war in Vietnam, and not just because one country is covered in jungle and plains and the other is covered in mountains and caves. The way they were fought was different. The reasons we were there were different. Who was sent over to fight was different. And all of this is important if we hope to come away from this with any meaningful lessons.
An Afghan is Not a VC
American involvement with Vietnam began in the fifties, during the French withdrawal from Indochina and the decolonialization efforts of the postwar period. Full-scale military intervention occurred in the interests of combating Soviet sphere expansion into Southeast Asia, which involved curbing local Chinese interests in Vietnam as well. Vietnamese leadership, multi-polar and divided mainly between those who supported American-NATO interests and everyone who didn’t, played both Soviet and Chinese interests for local gain. In the end, what Americans recognize as the Vietnam War was a drawn-out, politically confusing and tactically nightmarish end note to about thirty years of regional instability—which, in Cambodia’s case, continued for another decade.
But for our purposes here, we’re not terribly interested in what that conflict meant for the people whom it directly concerned. Rather, we’re interested in what that conflict meant for America, for the Americans who fought in it, and for those who were affected by it. We’ll see, briefly, how keeping these things in mind quickly unravels any efforts at comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam.
For the average American, Vietnam was fundamentally an anti-communist containment effort that began before the cultural revolution had broken out. Most Americans were dimly aware of some minor involvement prior to the Gulf of Tonkin, but naturally, it wasn’t a conflict to dwell on until the government decided to start drafting eighteen-year-olds and shipping them to the other side of the world on the pretenses of containing Soviet expansion.
As the cultural revolution at home picked up speed and eventually triumphed in the late 60s, the war became an integral part of the revolution’s narrative. Losing Vietnam was vindication of the revolution’s pitch. It wasn’t so much a vindication of anti-imperialism as it was a vindication that the old ways were broken—the old ways, in this case, meaning supporting anti-communist efforts abroad. Whatever the real politics were in Vietnam, in this case, were unimportant. Vietnam became viewed as a quagmire supported by Old White Guys and, therefore, something to be dispensed with in the post-revolutionary fervor. “See, of course you people lost. You weren’t hip and with-it. Get with the times.”
Consider how this occurred, also. Consider the grainy color footage of television cameras taping bloodied marines getting hauled onto stretchers and extracted by helicopters. Consider footage of rice patties filmed from the air and the M-60s of the support gunner framing the left side. Consider the reports from the Tet Offensive. The media was an active force in leveraging public opinion against the war—rightfully or not. It played an important role in turning an otherwise political and military conflict into a cultural one.
Notice how both of these aspects are held in stark contrast to America’s involvement in Afghanistan. The cultural revolution that occurred over the past decade was not one that made anti-war efforts a linchpin of its thrust. In fact, the state of war so-called has been the status quo for as long as many of its revolutionary foot soldiers have been alive. Meanwhile, the press’ coverage of Afghanistan has treated the conflict as primarily a foreign war waged by foreign combatants. In order to find regular reporting on either Afghanistan or Iraq occupations, you’d have to dig all the way back to the Bush years, with some exceptions for spectacular stories during Obama’s administration.
The Afghan war was not one that was televised. Boomers might tell you that this was good, as they might remember the gruesome images of bloodied marines on the nightly news. But instead, when America was keenly aware of a war being fought overseas that was costing blood and treasure, two generations of our present-day Americans were purchasing smartphones and tanking their birthrates. Most of us considered Afghanistan as little more than an alien vassal state that the United States was utterly uninvolved with. And most of us probably still can’t locate the country on a map.
And the distinction is deeper than that. How the wars were fought is important to consider as well. Vietnam had a draft, though only a little over a quarter of the combatants were draftees—instead, because there was a draft, high enrollment rates were encouraged by allowing those that volunteered greater choice over position. It was a committed war effort, in other words, which was part of the reason it became such a boiling topic for the culture war: pitching the deployment of some two million of your young men to the other side of the world was hard enough, particularly when there seemed to be mounting problems at home.
Afghanistan involved a near-twenty year occupation of its major cities using about a fifth of the manpower deployed to Vietnam. Part of the discrepancy in manpower can be attributed to three things: better trained soldiers, better technology, and a less-equipped and poorer enemy. But that’s not all. After the patriotic fervor of the post-9/11 days wore off, America was adamant: we didn’t want to be involved in a war. Six years after the towers fell, and two years into the fraudulent invasion of Iraq, and the average American wanted nothing to do with the foreign engagements.
Anti-war sentiment truly existed during the second leg of the Bush administration, but by 2008, it had mostly evaporated. The recession, Occupy Wall Street, and especially the Obama hype—all of it shifted American consciousness, and specifically American media, away from the idiotic talking points about having invaded for, say, oil. There was no draft, after all, so the average American, or whatever remained of such a measurement, was afforded the luxury of not caring.
No Way Home
An insidious element of the government’s interest in the Afghan occupation rears its head here. Remember that it was by Obama’s authority that the Afghanistan troop surge was implemented. When he took office in 2008, a steady increase of American troops to the country had resulted in around thirty-five thousand men as an occupational force. The height of the surge, three years later, saw about a hundred thousand in the country, which was scaled back when the surge ended in 2014 to its original thirty-some odd thousand.
A great deal of the Afghan war was fought with special forces and small groups of well-trained marines—a far cry from the grunt units used to subdue swaths of territory in Vietnam. They were aided by aerial support, both in the form of old school weaponry (like the C-130 outfitted with artillery) and highly advanced drone tech that improved by leaps and bounds during the twenty years we were there. Let’s not forget that drone striking enemy combatants and civilians alike became so commonplace as to be a meme during the Obama presidency.
Deescalation and withdrawal from the region had been a recurring theme among talking heads since Obama’s first term. Although foreign policy wonks and military brass spoke frequently about how ‘complicated’ or ‘difficult’ it was to bring the troops back home, the reality is that we did actually bring a significant number home over the last decade—why it took a decade is ultimately anyone’s guess, and for a couple of reasons. It was, again, under Obama’s watch that the nightmarish Sequester effort occurred, the result of a nice sounding idea that was an unmitigated disaster in implementation. It affected contractors and military alike.
The mentality behind the sequester, however, was one that demanded flat cuts and oversimplified pruning of expenditures across the board. Imagine looking at an out of control budget like an overgrown garden, but rather than targeting harmful weeds, you decide to take a sawzall to the top six inches of every plant. Radical restructuring and frantic redistribution of programs was the result, leading to a less functioning administration that ultimately cost more money to maintain.
A similar mentality was put into Obama’s withdrawal efforts. Claims of simplifying the field structure and turning regional control over to local operators resulted in dangerously uncertain chains of command. Mission objective became obscured. Operating in Afghanistan, by some accounts, became an experience that straddled the line between navigating a bureaucracy and actually doing one’s job.
In addition, when we consider the sheer volume of American activity over twenty years, the entire country became something of a place for American forces to cut their teeth in legitimate live-fire exercises—the fact that they weren’t, in fact, mere exercises is almost beside the point. It was a dumping ground of money, arms, and military manpower, a field operation with no end of mission possibilities but no clear overarching objective.
Our involvement in Afghanistan, in other words, can only be reasoned as being one of two things: it was either something no one wanted to take seriously, or it was made into a confusing, permanent war by design. If I had to guess, knowing what we do about American foreign policy and the behavior of spooks in the intelligence community, the reality is probably both. But more on that later.
The Official Story
Let’s rewind for a second to refresh our memories. In 2001, after some Israeli-approved Saudis hijacked a couple of planes and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York City, the intelligence community decided that Osama bin Laden was to blame for the attacks. Although he released no public statement, and he never openly boasted about what would easily be considered one of the greatest contemporary victories over Western decadence by Islamic jihad, nonetheless, we were convinced that Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda troop of militant Islamists were the culprits. And that they were in Afghanistan. And that the Taliban was sheltering them.
Some of this was certainly verifiable. Al-Qaeda, after all, began and was centered in Afghanistan, given that it started life in response to the Soviet invasion. But the details weren’t really important to the average American; Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and Taliban quickly became more or less synonymous. The fact that the last two referred to totally different organizations, one of which was effectively put into place by the American regime to begin with, wasn’t important to the narrative. Getting our guys into Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban, however, was.
Why we actually went in, I admit, I really don’t know. It wasn’t for the oil, which we were told in 2004, because Afghanistan’s oil reserves aren’t worth invading for. It wasn’t for the mineral deposits underneath its mountain ranges, because if it was, we would have mined them. It could very well have been for the poppy fields, which by the end of the 90s, accounted for some 70% or more of global opium production—today it’s over ninety. It could have been over some foreign relations vendetta or intelligence spook’s unfinished project. Maybe it really was just to get bin Laden.
But ten years later, we got bin Laden. He was in a different country, housed and protected by a different government, and by all appearances, more or less uninvolved in the day-to-day runnings of the Al-Qaeda network he was supposed to be in charge of. He was caught practically with his pants down by Seal Team Six, and then subsequently subjected to the sort of postmortem humiliation that the West relishes in: the widespread boasting of having discovered his alleged stash of pornography.
We invaded under the pretenses of punishing a regime that was housing a terrorist. After ten years of occupation, we found the terrorist in a different country and sheltered by an unrelated regime, but we stayed on for ten more years in Afghanistan for reasons that never had to be defined. It was too costly to leave. It was too complicated. Too messy. So we were told. Meanwhile, Afghanistan became a dumping ground for excess military budget spending, a place to send troops to experience war trauma, and a place for medals to be handed out.
Or was it? By the time Trump left office, American military casualties were next to nothing. By the time the conflict was declared disastrously over last week, there hadn’t been an American soldier death in more than a year and a half. Some claim this is reason enough for us to stay. And yet, the Taliban still retook the country in a matter of weeks. The fact Americans weren’t killed in the process speaks more to the fact that we’d had one foot out the door for quite a while. Good for us, I guess. I’m of the opinion, if it isn’t obvious, that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Spooks Gonna Spook
There’s another side to this, however.
As the Taliban rolled across the country in their combat-outfitted pickups, social media went abuzz with various videos depicting caches of weaponry and supplies that they just happened to stumble on. And not a crate of old weapons here or there, either: American-issued machine guns in enough supply to fill a bunker is depicted in one video. A couple days later, evidence that they’d gotten their hands on helicopters, trucks and humvees surfaced as well.
Could it be that this was all legitimate? Almost certainly. Could it be that, as we saw in Iraq about seven or eight years ago, these stockpiles were left behind intentionally? Under a certain definition, that’s true without any supposition—commanders have to be ordered to leave, after all, and it’s hardly an ‘oversight’ if your troops leave behind billions of dollars worth of equipment.
The question being asked, of course, is this: could it be that, again, as we saw in Iraq, these munitions were left behind specifically so that the Taliban would take possession of them?
In Iraq, so-called extremist groups took possession of ‘abandoned’ American military hardware the year before ISIS announced its existence to the world and conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria practically overnight. ISIS, anyone on the right should well be aware by now, was a group partly-funded and aided by the American intelligence apparatus—Glow In the Dark Spooks playing their typical spook game of foreign intervention.
Let’s say they were left behind on purpose. Let’s say our intelligent friends in the intelligence community negotiated with Taliban associates through some intelligent back channels. Let’s say they handed over a ton of equipment. But let’s rephrase this: let’s say our Deep State Spooks gave overpowered weaponry and equipment to regional warlords well-versed in guerrilla tactics.
When have they done this before? And why? History tells us that they usually do this for one of two reasons: toppling anti-American regimes in their own countries, or fighting foreign anti-American regimes in neighboring ones. China’s anti-American. China borders Afghanistan. China also has been pretty harsh on Muslim ethnics in the past decade—with Western media hyping it up especially in the last two years.
You can see where this is going. But there’s a problem here.
Prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America’s relationship with the Taliban was nonexistent. Arming, training, and assisting in their efforts to counter Soviet expansion followed a well-established policy of global tinkering that the CIA excelled at under several administrations, and that behavior didn’t simply go away. But that’s exactly the thing: the Taliban didn’t know Americans as anything other than another major foreign power at the time. Some spooks showed up and taught them how to use stinger missiles against HIND-Ds, and the Taliban were grateful for that.
Twenty years later, the same spooks pinned the deadliest terror attack on American soil on them. For so-called civilized countries, foreign policy might be a constant struggle of forgiving and forgetting, but not when you’re dealing with old worlders with a long history of resisting occupation. They might forgive you, but they won’t forget you. And the Taliban certainly won’t forget the last twenty years.
If this really is another spook ploy at using guerrilla intermediaries to aggravate a cold war rival, the likelihood of the Taliban cooperating with American interests seems dubious at best. They’ll take our equipment and probably even smile with veiled bemusement to any spook handlers looking to manipulate foreign affairs. But they won’t forget any of this. Are they even worried about China? So far, news has claimed that the Taliban has already agreed to talk to them, which is more than can be said for the UN’s begrudging acceptance of the Taliban back into the international fold.
It’s hard to say what happens next, but a few things are certain: they have close to a billion dollars worth of American guns and equipment, and they know how to use most of it. Biden’s admin handed over cash deposits as part of some farcical negotiation—he straight up paid them money as ransom for Kabul. And, like any good warrior class whose enemy deserves no respect, they took the money and they took Kabul.
Let’s remember that these same last couple decades of American foreign policy—particularly the last four or five years of top brass welcoming the woke purge of the current cultural revolution—should have any American aware of how far gone the intelligence apparatus is. The CIA headquarters and the Pentagon might be two totally different buildings, but let’s be fair: both have embraced the woke with gusto.
Lessons Not to Take Away From Defeat
First of all, it’s difficult to tell how much of a defeat this really is. As mentioned above, the degree to which command took the war and occupation of Afghanistan seriously is very difficult to tell. Additionally, the amount of regional support that the propped-up Americanized Afghan government obviously seems to have been near zero. The Taliban practically walked across the country and called it a conquest. Kabul, as far as we can tell, surrendered to barely a skirmish.
Additionally, the face of the Global American Empire has, in the last twenty years, totally revealed itself as one that supports all the things that actual Americans used to be repulsed and reviled by. Homosexuality, transsexualism, pornography, prostitution under the guise of women’s rights, abortion on demand, abolition of the family, etc.; these are the linchpins of American foreign policy now, recognized as such by Obama and subsequently standardized by Trump. There isn’t a single person on the right who wouldn’t want to see these things kicked out of this country, as well. Anyone who says otherwise can’t tell the difference between right and left. Or they’re liars.
Sure, there are a lot of people in Afghanistan that would have wanted us to stay. There are probably a lot of Afghans that wanted that, too. But the bigger picture here is that we shouldn’t have been there to begin with; Afghanistan has never been our backyard and we didn’t operate this occupation in a way that suggested we actually cared about being there. If our top brass cared about holding to the 9/11 narrative, we should have called it “Mission Accomplished” ten years ago when we bagged Osama bin Laden, deescalated, and come home within a year or two. The fact it was considered too difficult, too dangerous, or too complicated to do so simply showed that we probably shouldn’t have bombed their infrastructure to smithereens and toppled their government in the first place. But, of course, that was the point.
In retrospect, it’s difficult to see Afghanistan as anything other than an alignment of two usually unrelated things: intelligence community spooks getting out of hand and the military apparatus looking to blow off some steam. The fact bin Laden’s death in a neighboring country had no affect on our presence there seems to back this up.
On the other hand, there’s the unfortunate fate of those Afghan interpreters who worked with American forces in Afghanistan. The Taliban won’t forget them. It’s likely, if some sources are correct, that they’re already hard at work rooting them out and putting an end to their lives. It’s hard to tell, since no one on this subject can really be trusted—neither the American media nor the Taliban’s own words.
Certain pundits on the “right” will criticize the Biden administration on this issue, citing American military stabbing its allies in the back. Fair enough, but it’s hardly a reason to reoccupy the country that, again, we shouldn’t be in to begin with.
And of course, Biden’s administration is looking to funnel some tens of thousands of Afghan refugees out of Kabul in the coming weeks, however, in order to allegedly alleviate this exact cause for concern. In reality, it reeks of the sort of population replacement that the Regime is usually pretty good at.
The second lesson to take away from this, which a lot of commentators even on our side of things are quick to leap to, is that the backwards barbarians with AK-47s are more than capable of defeating an international global hegemon like the American empire. “It worked in Vietnam,” they’ll say, “and it worked in Afghanistan, so surely, better-trained militias in rural Appalachia can hold their own during a real insurrection event.”
Don’t believe them. For one thing, anyone who talks like this is a fed. Get that into your head first.
For another thing, as this whole post hopefully outlined, the war in Afghanistan was not a committed war effort. The Afghans were not VC, neither of them are white rural Americans, and the government’s interest in subjugating these three distinct groups has been totally different. By my estimation, the Regime’s hatred for rural America far outpaces how little it cared about Afghan labor and peasantry. By contrast, white rural America, and anyone adjacent to it—Old America, if you want to think of it that way—is the open enemy of the Regime and is all but declared as such.
Boomer-conservative holdouts will still support the military after all is said and done, just like they’ll support law enforcement even as cops zip tie ‘Karen’-like soccer moms for violating tyrannical COVID restrictions. Boomer-conservatives will insist that the American military will never willingly fire upon its own countrymen on its own soil, that things will never get to that point. Aside from that being wrong in both historical and practical senses, it seems clear that the American military probably won’t ever have to. At least not in any significant capacity.
Even if things did get hot, anyone who thinks for a minute that our country’s top brass wouldn’t issue orders to send SEALs in eradicate ‘resistance cels’ in rural America is flat-out delusional. These are the same generals who go to bat for Critical Race Theory, endorse transsexuals in the military, and see no problem with the very idea of maternity flight suits for air force pilots. The only thing that might stay their hand from more drastic measures is—typical of third world banana republics—fear that the international community might perceive the American regime as unstable.
Another hot American civil war would not play out like either Vietnam or Afghanistan, because the forces involved in the United States apparatus are too various, distinct, and unpredictable. But one thing is certain: there’s no winning move for the American people under such a scenario. Don’t listen to people who want to pretend that organizing into militias is the right thing to do right now. You’ll just find yourself in solitary confinement for twenty years. Ask anyone who was at the capitol on January sixth.
So with that out of the way, what are the lessons to take away from all of this?
Forget it, Jake. It’s Afghanistan.
