The Fall of Saigon and the Afghanistan Moment

When the Biden administration decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, its greatest fear was that the Afghan state that Americans had propped up for two decades would collapse. The administration knew that the state it left behind would be tenuous. This weakness had been a major factor in the protracted nature of the conflict. Many pundits, political observers, and certainly members of the State Department thought the Afghan state would fall one day. Optimists among them believed there would be a transitional state or a power-sharing agreement between Afghan leaders and the Taliban. Practically all of them expected the Afghan government to fight for months or even years against the Taliban, giving the United States time to evacuate its personnel and make decisions about refugees.

The State Department did not, however, predict that the army they trained and equipped would not fight. That was exactly the outcome that played out last week. Tens of thousands of Afghan troops simply surrendered. They left their weapons behind for either guarantees of safety or cash bribes. As the world prepared for a siege of Kabul, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled. A city of six million people fell to an insurgent army with minimal casualties.

Numerous American commentators naturally blamed the Biden administration for this state of affairs. Their favorite historical parallel was the Fall of Saigon. “This is Joe Biden’s Saigon,” tweeted House Republican leader Elise Stefanik after the Taliban’s victory became clear. The obvious point of comparison was the scene of helicopters airlifting Americans out of the U.S. Embassy in the South Vietnamese capital in 1975. Some Republicans believe that repeating this parallel may help them score political points and shift attention away from the Delta variant.

The Fall of Saigon was a pivotal moment in the history of American empire. But the context now is completely different, and the popular story of the aftermath in Vietnam is inaccurate as well. Nearly fifty years of American history will ensure that the response to Afghanistan will not be the same as so many today claim the Saigon experience was.

The Vietnam War, begun in earnest by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, was one of the costliest and least effective wars in American history. The idea that America would not win the war was mostly established by 1968, when the supposedly chastened North Vietnamese launched the countrywide Tet Offensive. What followed was five years of failed charges, devastating guerilla attacks, and illegal bombings of Vietnam and its neighbors.

Richard Nixon began his presidency by committing to win the war. But by the end of his first term, he was already trying to find a way out. In 1973, Nixon signed the Paris Peace Accords that withdrew U.S. troops. Nixon predicted the endurance of the South Vietnamese state. But two years later, under the watch of his successor, South Vietnam was overrun nearly as quickly as Afghanistan was this month. Gerald Ford had to oversee a haphazard withdrawal of embassy personnel. The image of helicopters evacuating Americans from Saigon became a symbol of the entire war effort, which dated in one form or another back to the Eisenhower administration.

There are clearly similarities between the situations in Saigon and Kabul. In both cases, the United States failed in its objective of nation-building and left a country to be overrun by its enemies. But the case in 2021 is much different than that of 1975. Vietnam was the first major failure of American foreign policy dating back decades. The Korean War had at least protected South Korea as an ostensible American ally. Vietnam was different. The failure in Saigon could be contrasted with successes in the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, Afghanistan’s collapse contrasts with the rise of ISIS in Iraq just seven years ago. It comes out of decades of failure. As a result, Americans are more fed up with foreign war in 2021 than they were in 1975.

One parallel that may end up being accurate is the one that is strangely being ignored by many Biden critics at this time. The fall of Saigon did not have the negative effect on American leadership that many observers believe Afghanistan may have on Biden. It is of course true that the Saigon moment helped show the ineffectiveness of an American war. But it was more of an indictment of the past two decades of imperial policy. For all of his faults, Gerald Ford was not responsible for South Vietnam’s collapse. His loss in the 1976 election was mainly due to the economy and his decision to pardon his predecessor.

Future criticism of the U.S.’s role in Afghanistan will be aimed mainly at Biden’s three predecessors. They were the ones who authorized the troop withdrawals that he simply refused to postpone any longer. Also, there is the unfortunate but sustained phenomenon of Afghanistan falling from domestic news headlines shortly after any events that occur there. Joe Biden’s political future will most likely be determined by either his handling of the pandemic or economic factors at home, not actions in a country several thousand miles away.

The fall of Kabul is undoubtedly an embarrassment to the United States. But it is long overdue. Americans could not win the war in Vietnam, and they could not win the war in Afghanistan either. There was no political will to build a nation-state or, in effect, a colony. The full-scale occupation needed to remake both nations was not supported by many Americans and could not happen in a democracy. As the New York Times argued on Monday, the fall of Afghanistan was a tragedy not because of its horror but because of its inevitability. The architects of the Vietnam War learned the same lesson in Saigon in 1975 that current foreign policy leaders are learning now on the other side of the Asian continent.

This piece first appeared on the author’s Medium page