From Saigon to Kabul

Wednesday 18th August, 2021

The US had its Saigon moment over the weekend in Kabul. The Americans have left behind another unfinished war. The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan two decades ago, promising to wipe out the Taliban, which harboured al-Qaeda, and bring order out of chaos. But today that country is back to square one. The Taliban are now in power, and their return to their old ways is only a matter of time. Although they have pledged, as part of the peace deal with the US, that they will respect human rights, it is not possible for them to honour this pledge because what drives them is religious extremism. Capturing territory is one thing, but running a country is quite another. The Taliban are desperate for some international legitimacy and claim to have no links to terrorist organisations. Ironically, what they have been doing all these years—executing dissenters, torture, violent suppression of people’s rights, especially those of women, etc— is terrorism in itself!

The US, which declared, after the 9/11 attacks, that it would never talk to terrorists, started making overtures to the Taliban. Washington would never have done so if it had not been convinced that it was fighting a never-ending war and had to get out of the Afghan imbroglio.

It has been reported that a whopping sum of USD 88 billion was spent on building the Afghan military to fight the Taliban, but its members surrendered en masse without a fight. All the money, mostly from the US taxpayers, has gone down the gurgler! This reminds us of the fate that befell the Tamil National Army (TNA) here after the withdrawal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF); the TNA cadres ran away just like the Afghan soldiers, unable to face the LTTE. Ironically, both the LTTE and the TNA were created by India, which, too, lost more than 1,400 of its military personnel at the hands of the LTTE.

The US wanted to give the Russians their Vietnam in Afghanistan, and succeeded in its endeavour in the late 1980s, when the Russian troops had to withdraw, unable to defeat the US-backed Afghan guerrillas. The US owes an apology to the people of Afghanistan fleeing the Taliban, formed by a group of hardcore Mujahideen guerrillas, who, backed by the CIA, fought the Russians in the 1980s. If Washington had continued to help Afghanistan and developed the vital sectors there, especially education, after Russia’s pullout, the Taliban would not have emerged. If it had done so, bin Laden, created by the CIA during America’s proxy war against the Russians, would not have been able to use Afghanistan as a base later to launch his terror attacks, and perhaps the World Trade Centre complex would have been safe.

The US has been hoist with its own petard. It was able to have the Russians humiliated and driven out of Afghanistan, but a little over three decades on, had the same degrading experience; it had to swallow its pride, negotiate with the Taliban and make a tail-between-the-legs exit. Worse, the US had not assessed the Taliban properly even after fighting them for 20 years; it had made the same mistake in Vietnam about six decades back. Last month, President Joe Biden declared: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan … The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” He was left with egg on his face when the Taliban captured Kabul with ease.

While a red-faced Biden administration is trying to have the world believe that the humiliating US retreat from Kabul was not its Saigon moment, the success of the Taliban is sure to inspire other extremist outfits all over the world. The US and its allies have demonstrated that they are not equal to the task of fighting terror in spite of their military might.

One only hopes the Taliban have learnt their lessons and will mend their ways without turning Afghanistan into a hellhole again.