In the last weeks and months the Taliban militant group, an Islamist political organisation toppled from power in 2001 following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom, has regained vast swathes of territory across the country in a concerted effort to become the governing regime once more.
This resurgence comes amidst the final withdrawal of residual US and NATO military personnel which had remained in the country since 2017 to train up Afghan security forces, in preparation for the complete handover of national governance to the President Ashraf Ghani regime.
US President Joe Biden set a symbolic final withdrawal date of 11th September 2021, exactly 20 years on from the 9/11 terrorist attacks which prompted the original invasion of Afghanistan, but this in itself has long caused concerns of a Taliban resurgence once crucial American support leaves the country.
President Biden has remained publicly confident that Taliban militants will not topple the Ghani government in Kabul. However, with the Taliban currently operating an estimated 85,000 full-time fighters, their strongest troop force since 2001, his confidence is not shared by much of the Western intelligence community.
A June report by US intelligence agencies concluded that the Afghan government could fall to a Taliban insurgency just six months after full coalition forces departure, around March of 2022.
As it stands, Taliban forces currently control around half of Afghan territory, holding several key strategic areas such as cities and other major population zones. On Thursday, as I write, the Taliban has reportedly taken the city of Ghazni, the 10th provincial capital to fall to the militants in less than a week.
Ghazni is of particular strategic significance to the Taliban, providing a starting platform for a later assault on the Afghan capital of Kabul. Indeed, many US intelligence officials view the taking of Ghazni as an assurance of an eventual victory for Taliban forces, providing such an important tactical and military advantage.
Another major fear is that the country could once more become a training ground for Islamist terrorist organisations, as with the Al Qaeda group which masterminded the 2001 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC.
Taliban officials have insisted they intend to honour the terms of a deal signed in 2020 with the US – which pledges the group to take action against Islamist terrorist groups operating out of Afghanistan- but experts remain unconvinced. Many argue that the Taliban and groups like Al Qaeda are inseparable, with many Al Qaeda militants currently fighting for Taliban forces and engaged in training activity.
The situation looks bleak; Afghan national forces are weakening, many are in retreat across the country, and the resurgence of the Taliban to its former supremacy looks to be a bygone conclusion.
By all accounts, the nearly-20 year war in Afghanistan looks to have been a comprehensive long-term failure for Western coalition forces, with the seemingly imminent collapse of a democratic Afghan government unable to sustain itself without continuous military support.
Parallels with the Fall of Saigon?
In times of great pessimism about the failure of US-led military operations, it seems an irrepressible fact of life that the Vietnam War be referenced in discussions, being an event of such magnitude in modern Western political history and one with great impact on the collective American consciousness.
To attempt to describe the war in Afghanistan as a simple repeat of the Vietnam War would be to largely misrepresent the political, military and historical realities of both conflicts.
However, we can certainly draw parallels between the two, and in particular reference to a comparison between events currently unfolding and the effective end of the war in Vietnam in 1975: the fall of Saigon.
The fall of Saigon, the governing capital of South Vietnam, on 30th April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War, the beginning of Vietnamese reunification, and a profound humiliation for the United States.
The scenes of American embassy workers and soldiers being frantically airlifted off building tops amidst the advance of Vietcong forces is one of the major, enduring images of the war, providing a visceral reminder of the dangers of military overreach, the difficulties of combatting guerrilla warfare, and the many fallen American soldiers who lost their lives fighting a foreign war in a foreign land for a reason they couldn’t fully understand.
Though a simple comparison between the two conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan would be egregiously misrepresentative, the parallels are stark and there for all to see.
Both lasted around 20 years, both involved large-scale US troop surges once the realities of what first seemed an easily-winnable asymmetric conflict became clear, both became greatly unpopular with the public and would come to define the presidencies of their key commanders-in-chief (Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush respectively), and both would involve a retrenchment of US policy objectives to less ambitious goals involving the large-scale removal of ground troops.
For the Fall of Saigon and the present danger facing Kabul, the parallels persist. Both the South Vietnamese and current Afghan regime faced growing peril once US military support was withdrawn, both suffered the loss of vast swathes of land as the enemy force regrouped and advanced, and, in both cases, the fragility of the defending regime’s military capabilities was quickly exposed as the invading force made significantly quicker and greater progress than analysts would predict (a March 1975 memo from the CIA indicated the South Vietnamese would hold out until at least 1976).
As far as the aforementioned historical parallels are concerned, the omens don’t look good for Kabul and its current government.
However, history does not simply repeat itself in uniformity and with exact precision. With this in mind, we can only hope that in a few months’ time we in the West aren’t talking about the Fall of Kabul and the lessons that should’ve been heeded over four decades ago.
By all means, Western coalition forces could not, and cannot, perpetually remain in Afghanistan. Despite this, perhaps more could’ve been done, or could still be done, to prevent the resurgence of another Islamist regime and carve out a fair settlement for an Afghan people that have seen enough war across the past two decades.
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