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


Zelensky says Ukraine used 117 drones in attacks on Russian air bases

Updated 55 min 38 sec ago
Follow

Zelensky says Ukraine used 117 drones in attacks on Russian air bases

KYIV: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday it deployed 117 drones in a massive attack against Russian air bases that he called “our most long-range operation” in more than three years of war.
“A total of 117 drones were used in the operation. And a corresponding number of drone operators worked,” Zelensky said in a statement, adding that “34 percent of the strategic cruise missile carriers at the airfields were hit.”


Bangladesh opens trial of deposed ex-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina

Updated 01 June 2025
Follow

Bangladesh opens trial of deposed ex-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina

  • The investigators brought charges of crimes against humanity against Hasina over killing of hundreds of students in a mass uprising last year
  • Hasina has been in exile in India since Aug. 5, 2023, while former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan is missing and possibly also is in India

DHAKA: A special tribunal set up to try Bangladesh’s ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina began proceedings Sunday by accepting the charges of crimes against humanity filed against her in connection with a mass uprising in which hundreds of students were killed last year.

The Dhaka-based International Crimes Tribunal directed investigators to produce Hasina, a former home minister and a former police chief before the court on June 16.

Hasina has been in exile in India since Aug. 5, 2023, while former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan is missing and possibly also is in India. Former police chief Chowdhury Abdullah Al Mamun has been arrested. Bangladesh sent a formal request to India to extradite Hasina in December.

State-run Bangladesh Television broadcast the court proceedings live.

In an investigation report submitted on May 12, the tribunal’s investigators brought five allegations of crimes against humanity against Hasina and the two others during the mass uprising in July-August last year.

According to the charges, Hasina was directly responsible for ordering all state forces, her Awami League party and its associates to carry out actions that led to mass killings, injuries, targeted violence against women and children, the incineration of bodies and denial of medical treatment to the wounded.

Three days after Hasina’s ouster, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus took over as the nation’s interim leader.

In February, the UN human rights office estimated that up to 1,400 people may have been killed in Bangladesh over three weeks in the crackdown on the student-led protests against Hasina, who ruled the country for 15 years.

The tribunal was established by Hasina in 2009 to investigate and try crimes involving Bangladesh’s independence war in 1971. The tribunal under Hasina tried politicians, mostly from the Jamaat-e-Islami party, for their actions during the nine-month war against Pakistan. Aided by India, Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father and the country’s first leader.


Macron condemns ‘unacceptable’ violence during football celebrations

Updated 01 June 2025
Follow

Macron condemns ‘unacceptable’ violence during football celebrations

  • Two people died and police made nearly 600 arrests across France overnight as football fans celebrated PSG’s 5-0 triumph over Inter Milan in Munich
  • Macron hosted Coach Luis Enrique and his team after their victory parade on the famed Champs Elysee

PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday condemned the “unacceptable” violence during celebrations following Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League final victory, as he welcomed the triumphant team to the Elysee palace.
“Nothing can justify what has happened in the last few hours, the violent clashes are unacceptable,” the French leader said.
“We will pursue, we will punish, we will be relentless,” he added before congratulating the players on their win.
Two people died and police made nearly 600 arrests across France overnight as football fans celebrated PSG’s 5-0 triumph over Inter Milan in Munich.
“The violent clashes that took place are unacceptable and have come at a heavy cost: two people are dead, around 30 police officers and several firefighters have been injured,” Macron said.
“My thoughts are also with the police officer in Coutances who is currently in a coma,” he added.
Macron hosted Coach Luis Enrique and his team after their victory parade on the famed Champs Elysee, thanking the players for their quick condemnation of the previous night’s chaos.
“These isolated acts are contrary to the club’s values and in no way represent the vast majority of our supporters, whose exemplary behavior throughout the season deserves to be commended,” the club said on Sunday.


British FM says Morocco’s autonomy plan for W. Sahara ‘most credible’ solution

Updated 01 June 2025
Follow

British FM says Morocco’s autonomy plan for W. Sahara ‘most credible’ solution

  • Britain previously backed self-determination for the disputed Western Sahara, which Morocco claims as an integral part of its kingdom
  • Spain and Germany now officially back the Moroccan autonomy plan, while France last summer recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over the territory

RABAT: British Foreign Minister David Lammy said on Sunday that Morocco’s autonomy plan for the territory of Western Sahara was the “most credible” solution to the decades-long dispute, reversing London’s long-standing position.
Western Sahara, a mineral-rich former Spanish colony, is largely controlled by Morocco but has been claimed in its entirety for decades by the pro-independence Polisario Front, which is backed by Algeria.
Morocco has been campaigning for broad support for its autonomy plan after obtaining US recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed territory in 2020, in exchange for the normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel.
“The United Kingdom considers Morocco’s autonomy proposal submitted in 2007 as the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis for a lasting resolution of the dispute,” Lammy told reporters in Rabat.
Britain previously backed self-determination for the disputed territory, which Morocco claims as an integral part of its kingdom.

The United Kingdom considers Morocco’s autonomy proposal submitted in 2007 as the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis for a lasting resolution of the dispute

UK Foreign Minister David Lammy

Moroccan foreign minister Nasser Bourita welcomed the shift, saying the new British position contributed “greatly to advancing this momentum and promoting the UN path toward a definitive and mutually acceptable solution based on the autonomy initiative.”
Rabat’s push for support for its autonomy plan has seen success.
Spain and Germany now officially back the Moroccan autonomy plan, while France last summer recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over the territory.
“This year is a vital window of opportunity to secure a resolution before we reach 50 years of the dispute in November,” said Lammy.
The foreign minister also said it encouraged “relevant parties to engage urgently and positively with the United Nations-led political process.”
The United Nations considers Western Sahara a “non-self-governing territory” and has had a peacekeeping mission there since 1991, whose stated aim is to organize a referendum on the territory’s future.
But Rabat has repeatedly ruled out any vote where independence is an option, instead proposing an autonomy plan.
The ceasefire collapsed in mid-November 2020 after Moroccan troops were deployed to the far south of the territory to remove separatists blocking the only route to Mauritania — a route they claimed was illegal, as it did not exist in 1991.
The UN Security Council is calling for negotiations without preconditions, while Morocco insists they focus solely on its autonomy plan.
“The only viable and durable solution will be one that is mutually acceptable to the relevant parties and is arrived at through compromise,” added Lammy.
In a joint statement, the United Kingdom noted that its export credit agency, UK Export Finance, may consider supporting projects in the Sahara as part of its commitment to mobilize 5 billion British pounds (approximately 5.9 billion euros) for new economic initiatives in Morocco.


Bangladesh opens trial of ex-PM Hasina for crimes against humanity

Updated 01 June 2025
Follow

Bangladesh opens trial of ex-PM Hasina for crimes against humanity

  • Hearing broadcast live for first in special tribunal’s history
  • Former home minister, ex-police chief ordered to be in court for second hearing on June 16

DHAKA: Bangladeshi prosecutors on Sunday opened the trial of fugitive former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is charged with orchestrating last year’s deadly crackdown on student-led protests.

Peaceful demonstrations, triggered by the reinstatement of a quota system for the allocation of civil service positions, began in early July 2024 but two weeks later they were met with a communications blackout and a violent crackdown by security forces.

In early August, as protesters defied a nationwide curfew, Hasina resigned and fled the country, ending 15 years in power of her Awami League party-led government.

“She unleashed various law enforcement and intelligence agencies against them (the protesting students) … They slaughtered the agitating students, injured them and committed crimes against humanity,” Mohammad Tajul Islam, chief prosecutor at Bangladesh’s domestic International Crimes Tribunal, told the court in his opening speech.

He charged the 77-year-old with “incitement, aiding and abetting, involvement in the commission of the crimes of murder, attempted murder, torture and other inhumane acts as part of the widespread and systematic attacks on innocent unarmed students and the public.”

The UN’s human rights office concluded in February that between July 15 and Aug. 5, 2024, the former government and its security and intelligence apparatus, together with “violent elements” linked to the Awami League, “engaged systematically in serious human rights violations and abuses in a coordinated effort to suppress the protest movement.”

It estimated that at least 1,400 people were killed during the protests, the majority by bullets from military rifles.

ICT investigators have collected video footage, audio clips, records of helicopter and drone movements, as well as statements from victims of the crackdown as part of the probe.

They also “seized records of telephonic conversations of Sheikh Hasina, in which she repeatedly confirmed that she ordered all the state agencies to eliminate innocent civilians peacefully protesting for a fair demand, using helicopters, drones and APCs (armored personnel carriers),” Islam said.

Sunday’s hearing was broadcast live for the first in the ICT’s history.

“The court accepted the charges against Sheikh Hasina, former Home Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and former police chief Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun. There are five charges against them and the court accepted all five charges. We presented the charges through live broadcast before the nation,” Islam told reporters after the hearing.

Al-Mamun is the only accused who has been detained while the ex-home minister is in hiding and Hasina remains in self-imposed exile in neighboring India.

The next hearing is scheduled to take place on June 16. The tribunal ordered all three accused to be presented before the court.

The International Crimes Tribunal was established by Hasina in 2010 to investigate crimes committed by the Pakistani army and its loyalists during Bangladesh’s independence war in 1971.

Over the years, it grew to be widely seen as the Hasina government’s tool for eliminating political rivals.