Thoughts of Afghanistan

Believe it or not, I occasionally still get into debates about the Vietnam War.

I occasionally encountered right-wing Americans who believe that America could have won the war if the hippies hadn't betrayed the war effort.  (My wife's best friend was dating an ex-military type who spouted these opinions.)

On the other side, I occasionally encounter British friends who try to tell me that America was militarily defeated by the Vietnamese.

I argue against both of these opinions.  America never militarily lost the war, I tell my British friends.  We could have stayed in Vietnam forever, if we had wanted to.  

What we couldn't do, however, was dictate how Vietnam was going to govern itself, and then go home and expect them to keep doing what we wanted.  If we wanted to dictate how Vietnam was going to organize itself, then we would have had to stay there forever.  

In that sense, the war was unwinnable.  

The United States military is the strongest military in the world.  It can defeat any foreign army.  But what we can't do is to fly halfway around the world, re-organize the society of a foreign country, and then fly home and expect our re-organization to stay in place 2 minutes after we leave.  Those wars are always unwinnable.  

...I haven't mentioned Afghanistan yet, but you can tell where I'm going with this, right?

I've not researched the collapse in-depth, but there appears to be an interesting parallel with how quickly the South Vietnamese government collapsed after the U.S. withdraw, and how quickly the Afghanistan government collapsed after the U.S. withdraw.  Again, it shows that these type of wars are unwinnable.  You can keep your army in Vietnam for 20 years or Afghanistan for 20 years, but 2 minutes after you leave, the locals are going to go back to organizing their society the way they want to.

As for the criticisms of Biden:

From everything I've heard, it sounds the withdraw could have been better organized.  But let's be honest, there was no way to do this in a dignified matter.  Things were going to start collapsing the minute we started withdrawing, and there was never a version of this withdraw that was going to look good.  So they'd still be criticizing Biden on right-wing media no matter how this played out.  

But, that's not to say Biden gets a free pass on this entirely.  If the withdraw could've been better organized, then let him be criticized appropriately.

The 2019 Afghan papers are worth re-visiting (link here).  See also this previous post by me on the same subject here.