Was Afghanistan Really Vietnam Redux?

What can we learn from America's two futile wars

In the May/June 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs, journalist George Packer profiled the career of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke which extended from 1963 to his death in 2010. The span of his career is notable because it began with Holbrooke’s service in Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer and ended while he was the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. These were remarkable endpoints to a distinguished life of service that included stints as Ambassador to Germany and to the UN, and negotiating the Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. Holbrooke’s observations from Vietnam and Afghanistan were at their core a critique of US policy. Packer quotes Holbrooke’s from a letter Holbrooke sent an acquaintance during his time in Vietnam:

There is no doubt in my mind that if we lose here we will be fighting this war in other countries in Latin America and Asia within a few years. But right now, we are fighting wrong, and it hurts. In the short run terms, we really should be on the other side. Take away the ties to Hanoi and Peking and the VC are fighting for the things we should always be fighting for in the world. Instead we continue to defend a class of haves which has not yet shown its real ability to understand that the have-nots must be brought into the nation. Let that be shown, and perhaps there will be an improvement in the situation, not of our making, but to our benefit.

Last week, the last remaining US troops left Afghanistan after 20 years of military engagement. The chaotic beginning to the air evacuation of Americans and Afghans who had worked with us brought near-hysterical comparisons in the media to the 1975 Saigon pullout. Granting the initial problems, the evacuation of 140,000 persons in a short time by the US military and other countries was a remarkable accomplishment. Our final exit was never going to be flawless, but the Biden administration is being criticized for missteps that history will probably deem insignificant after 20 years of policy failures. In one sense, the Administration had been boxed in by the deal the previous Administration had made with the Taliban in February 2020, agreeing to pull all American troops out by May 2021. In the slap-dash approach that typified much of the Trump foreign policy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo negotiated the agreement with the Taliban without the involvement of the Afghan government we purportedly supported.

It will take some time to get a complete assessment of where we went wrong in Afghanistan. Start with the fact that we forced the Taliban out of power by early 2002 only to return it to them after 20 years of fighting. As in Vietnam, our efforts to build a viable nation-state with an effective military to secure it failed. Perhaps the greatest policy failure with no direct comparison to Vietnam was to let the opportunity we had in the 2002-2003 period, when the Taliban were at their weakest, slip away from us by diverting energy and resources to a futile war in Iraq.

The parallels between America’s two wars of misplaced purposes come into clear focus when we view the aftermath. Twenty years after our final exit from Saigon, we established normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Trade relations have grown to the point the US is now Vietnam’s largest export market. And on security issues, our former enemy is now a partner in our efforts to contain the spread of Chinese influence in the Far East.

It is far too soon to predict a similar trajectory in our relationship with a post-war Afghanistan but there are some signs that the Biden administration will take a pragmatic stance in dealing with the Taliban government. The reported secret meeting in Kabul between CIA director William Burns and Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in August may signal a willingness for cooperation on specific issues. It may not be extreme conjecture that the Taliban would like assistance in dealing with their own terrorist threat in the form of ISIS-K, a dissident splinter group. For their part, the Taliban are indicating a desire to win diplomatic recognition from other nations. There is an obvious understanding on the part of Afghanistan’s new leaders that they must attain good standing in the international community in order to attract the foreign aid necessary to support their nation’s economy. 

And it may be that our most basic failing was to be “too American” in a foreign land, to never fully grasp the reality of a different culture. In his article, Packer sums up Holbrooke’s views this way:

And maybe we don’t take the politics of other people seriously. It comes down to the power of our belief in ourselves. If we are good—and are we not good?—then we won’t need to force other people to do what we want. They will know us by our deeds, and they will want for themselves what we want for them.

There was a Peanuts comic strip that circulated among Holbrooke and his friends in Vietnam. Charlie Brown’s baseball team has just gotten slaughtered, 184–0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?!”

So, while we wait for the history of our 20-year endeavor in Afghanistan to be written, for the scholars and journalists to offer their accounts, the only take-away for now may be found in the quote attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”