Collapse of Kabul Is More Dire Than Saigon

Editor's Note: Below is a complimentary research note written by National Security analyst LTG Dan Christman. To access our Macro Policy research please email sales@hedgeye.com.

           

Takeway: "As a veteran of combat in Vietnam and more than three decades of Army service since I fought there, I want to start with an optimistic note in the midst of the unfolding Afghanistan tragedy – one that underscores the Vietnam-Afghanistan differences: our armed forces, and especially the U.S. Army. Our Army was broken by the early ‘70’s – “hollow,” as an Army Chief of Staff accurately put it later in the decade. The contrast with today’s armed forces is breathtaking."

A long-running and gripping Israeli TV series on the conflict with the Palestinians was appropriately entitled “Fauda” – Arabic for “Chaos.”

It’s a perfect description of the scenes unfolding in Kabul every day, especially now in the wake of the horrific bombing by ISIS-K that took the lives of 13 brave Marines last week. And for weeks prior, pundits weren’t missing opportunities to compare Afghanistan to the “Fauda” of a disintegrating South Vietnam. 

Recognizing Afghanistan is a region where “ground truth” about developments is often not revealed - if ever - until decades afterwards, what can usefully be said at this point about the “Why” of the Afghan collapse, and about the Saigon comparison?

The “Why” of a collapsing Afghanistan is not terribly complicated: corruption at the top in Kabul; a strategy to extend the writ of central government authority to the provinces, something unique in Afghan history; an Afghan army fashioned after our own and thus totally dependent on tenuous contractor technical assistance; U.S. “mission creep” that went well beyond the original goal of denying al Qaeda safe havens; a fatally flawed “Doha Peace process” under Trump, followed by an inept withdrawal plan under Biden, that convinced Afghans we no longer had their backs; a Taliban ability to use psychological operations, social media, and public affairs effectively to undermine an already fragile loyalty in the provinces to Kabul.

And as Ambassador Ryan Crocker highlighted last week in the NYT, the “lack of U.S. strategic patience!” The end? 

An acute embarrassment for the U.S., one already seized on by adversaries to bolster their regional and global goals. 

But the Vietnam/Afghanistan comparison is the more intriguing topic in trying to understand the strategic implications of the Kabul collapse.

The “visuals” – helicopter overflights, frightened civilians, embassies and airports besieged - certainly reinforce the view that the two tragedies are cut from the same historical bolt of cloth. The differences, however, are far more stark than the similarities.

In a nutshell, the collapse of our efforts in Afghanistan will prove more consequential to U.S. security than even the most dire forecasts in the wake of Saigon’s collapse in the spring of 1975.

Why? Because under the Taliban, Afghanistan will once again be a recruiting and training ground for jihadists of global reach. And because nuclear-armed Pakistan now faces a near-existential threat from another Taliban – its own!

These are the major worries – NOT the diplomatic fallout with allies, not the worry about loss of trust in U.S. commitments, and not the downsides of being frozen out of strategic and business opportunities in Central Asia    

As a veteran of combat in Vietnam and more than three decades of Army service since I fought there, I want to start with an optimistic note in the midst of the unfolding Afghanistan tragedy – one that underscores the Vietnam-Afghanistan differences: our armed forces, and especially the U.S. Army.

Our Army was broken by the early ‘70’s – “hollow,” as an Army Chief of Staff accurately put it later in the decade.

We entered Vietnam with a draft Army, left it with a volunteer force, and by Saigon’s collapse in ’75 found it impossible to recruit the numbers needed to man adequately the new, professional force. Morale had plummeted, drug use was rampant, equipment was outdated, and Congressional, as well as public support, had vanished.

The contrast with today’s armed forces is breathtaking. Afghan veterans are clearly distraught by the August collapse; but those who remain in the force are seasoned professionals, as we see every day at the Kabul airport.

They are capably led, and they’re supported by a Congress and American public who, unlike the early 70’s, are able to distinguish those who serve from those who make the policy that shapes their service. It’s a stunning and welcome reversal. 

On U.S. security, I outlined earlier the deeply worrisome implications of our Afghan withdrawal; and here, the Vietnam-Afghan comparison loses even more coherence.

After Saigon fell, a reunited Vietnam’s focus was internal - to rebuild after more than twenty-five years fighting the French and the U.S.; and regional - invading Cambodia in early 1979 because of fears of Chinese influence, and then warding off a Chinese invasion in their north a month later. After 1975, the U.S. was no longer in the strategic calculus of Hanoi, nor was Hanoi in the calculus of Washington! The “Domino Theory” had by then been completely discredited.

Not so with Afghanistan, where strategic and security calculations dominate. The Taliban victory will be a recruiting magnet for jihadists of all stripes to enter the country and train for global operations.

Terrorism expert Peter Bergen commented a week ago that “For the global jihadist movement, the victory of the Taliban will be as significant as ISIS victories were in Iraq.”

The Taliban have never severed their close affiliation with al Qaeda, and al Qaeda’s goals remain focused on global jihad. As CIA Director Bill Burns has made clear, it will become far more difficult to gather intelligence against al Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadist groups in Afghanistan with no U.S. ground presence.

The reality of a terrorist organization with global reach reestablishing itself in Afghanistan is why the strategic and security consequences of Kabul’s fall far outweigh whatever anguish we felt in April 1975 as South Vietnam disintegrated. 

Next, on U.S. foreign policy, there is extensive breast-beating on what this withdrawal means in terms of friends and allies losing “trust and confidence” in the U.S. While some analysts and politicians in western Europe – the UK and Germany especially – are wringing hands, the foreign policy implications are likely to prove ephemeral. 

As Ambassador Dan Fried at the Atlantic Council recently wrote, the Russians and Chinese will certainly “make a meal out of the mess in Afghanistan.” But, Fried continued, it doesn’t mean that our treaty commitments (NATO, Middle East, Asia-Pacific) are worthless; they were never seriously questioned after the Saigon collapse, and are not in jeopardy now. There’s no “green light” for Russia to invade Estonia, nor for China to attack Taiwan!

One of Europe’s most respected foreign policy analysts, Robin Niblett of the UK’s Chatham House, wrote just days ago that the “new initiatives that the Biden Administration put in place with its European and Asian allies in the last six months promise to be far more meaningful to the future of transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security than the legacy of its failures in Afghanistan.”

And as an aside, a president who publicly questions the core of NATO’s collective defense guarantee (Article V) did far more damage to U.S. credibility and trust than has the embarrassment of the Afghanistan collapse. 

Finally, unlike Southeast Asia in the 1970’s where U.S. commercial investment was minimal, there will be some commercial pain felt by the U.S. and U.S. companies in the Central Asian corridor; China’s Belt and Road initiative has long been making strategic advances here.

No surprise then that “Commercial courtship” with the Taliban by Chinese as well as by Pakistani and Russian diplomats and investors is already underway, hoping for inroads in key Afghanistan mineral extractive industries - copper and Rare Earths, for example.

There will clearly be downsides going forward if the U.S. is looking for strategic or commercial opportunities.

But this is Central Asia, not central Europe or the western Pacific! If there is an enduring geo-strategic lesson to be gleaned from both the Vietnam and Afghanistan experiences, it is that the U.S. can’t invest fiscal and military treasures in every corner of the globe, disconnected from overriding interests and clear objectives.

Some strategic prioritization is now inevitable, indeed necessary, if the China challenge is to be appropriately addressed. Central Asia is unlikely to be high on the Biden prioritization list.

And on Pakistan, as Ian Bremmer of the Asia Institute recently said, “all eyes are now on Islamabad!” Yes, Pakistan appears to have gained “strategic depth” now that an apparently friendly Taliban government is being installed in Kabul.

But for too long Islamabad has downplayed the threat from the Pakistan Taliban (TTP), a movement whose attacks and targeted assassinations have for over a decade threatened the foundations of Pakistan’s internal security.

Should the Afghan Taliban establish a Caliphate next door, it will only add to the jihadi threat inside Pakistan – indeed, as Foreign Policy magazine recently reported, it’s a threat that is already unfolding.

With well over 100 nuclear weapons inside Pakistan itself, it’s not hard to exaggerate the cataclysmic implications should the TTP march into Islamabad.  

BOTTOM LINE

As tragic as the collapse of South Vietnam was for combat veterans of that conflict, and for a generation of diplomats, the consequences were minor compared to what’s unfolding now in the “graveyard of empires,” and potentially inside Pakistan.

One similarity that’s common to both the Vietnam and Afghanistan failures? The inevitable cynicism that arises by those fighting lengthy conflicts with murky overarching objectives. During my Vietnam combat tour with the 101st Airborne division in 1969, I saw a sign as I entered a U.S. bunker in Thua Thien province, north of Hue. It was a quote from a Rudyard Kipling poem, penned about struggles in the late 19^th century in a far region of the British empire in India’s northwest.

The same sign has probably also appeared on numerous U.S. combat outposts in Afghanistan toward the end of our direct involvement there; the sign in the Thua Thien bunker read, “The end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased; and an epitaph drear, ‘A fool lies here, who tried to hustle the east!’” 

Sadly, the long Afghanistan movie has many more seasons to run. The war is far from over.