Comparisons between Afghanistan and Saigon are deeply flawed

Comparisons between Afghanistan and Saigon are deeply flawed

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 5:21 p.m. EDT

The horrible and wrenching scenes attending the fall of the Afghanistan government has inspired countless comparisons with the fall of Saigon. The parallels cited are many and they are heartbreaking: Refugees fleeing, families desperate to find a way out, U.S. military advisers and troops departing, embassy staff being evacuated by helicopter.

In a way, though, this comparison is a proxy for a deeper claim: The idea that what we’re seeing now will be experienced as a moment of national trauma, searing introspection and intense political recriminations — particularly ones directed at President Biden — similar to what happened in the wake of the loss in Vietnam.

The comparison, however, is a seriously strained one. As Eric Boehlert points out, the politics of this moment are vastly different, because unlike under Biden, tens of thousands of Americans died abroad under the administration that ultimately ended the war in Vietnam. But the flaws in the comparison run even deeper, and the differences are illuminating.

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To understand how, I spoke to Michael Kazin, a historian of the American left who has authored the forthcoming book, “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.” An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.

Greg Sargent: We’re seeing a lot of comparisons between the helicopters lifting off in Saigon and the fall of Afghanistan. But American society in the 1970s had fresh memories of the successes of World War II, whereas this time we’ve had 20 years of a grinding, failed presence in Afghanistan, and also the Iraq debacle.

Similarly, in the 1970s the strength of the left was a shock for many Americans amid society being torn apart by the sixties, urban riots and the backlash to civil rights. American society might have been more traumatized by the failure of Vietnam than it might be by the failure in Afghanistan.

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Michael Kazin: The intervention in Vietnam began when most Americans believed the U.S. was on the right side of every war. It was the “American Century.” Most Americans agreed that America had not just a duty to change the world in its image, but also a right to do it.

Whereas for decades now, most Americans have not thought things are going well. We have a crisis of confidence, and we’ve had one for a while.

Sargent: There’s reason to believe that the public today will be a little more jaded, and not as shocked as many seem to be suggesting.

Kazin: It’s not as if people are saying — as Ronald Reagan did about the Vietnam War in 1980 — that this was an honorable war. Lots of Americans believed that at the time — we were fighting communism, we were fighting the Cold War.

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After Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, I think that for most Americans, the primary motivation for being in Afghanistan was gone.

Sargent: When Trump vowed to pull us out of Mideast quagmires, the press corps treated it as shrewd politics — it would speak to the American people’s weariness of Forever Wars. But now that Biden is executing this policy, it’s being treated as a certain political disaster.

What we’re actually seeing in the execution is much worse than anything we expected, but it seems as if the war weariness that pundits recognized in the American people is no longer seen as a factor.

Kazin: That’s a real blind spot of the media. There are going to be more recriminations. But they likely won’t last, because Americans are genuinely weary of wars like this one. The only time Americans were for this war was when they were afraid of terror attacks.

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Sargent: Some journalistic accounts describe this as a “humiliation.” We know at this point that the U.S. really can’t manage these things as effectively as we once thought. Will people experience this as humiliation?

Kazin: It should make American policymakers feel somewhat humbled — they put all this money and intelligence and credibility into this, and failed. And of course if you fought there — or you know people who fought there, died there — then it feels like humiliation.

It’s ironic that the U.S. is more successful fighting wars against powerful countries — Germany and Japan — than in fighting wars in undeveloped countries, partly because we invaded those countries.

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It should be an important lesson: When the U.S. goes into places where we don’t understand what’s going on, we don’t do well. That was true in Vietnam, true in Afghanistan, true in Iraq.

Sargent: How quickly were the lessons of Vietnam forgotten, and what are the prospects that we’ll forget the lessons of Afghanistan just as quickly?

Kazin: There was always a group of people in the foreign policy elite who believed that Vietnam could have been won. There’s always a difference among policymakers and historians of these wars about whether the whole thing was a mistake, or whether the way the war was conducted was a mistake. We’ll see that again in all the commentary about Afghanistan.

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If you think it’s a mistake to send lots of troops to set up a government in your own image — to try to make Afghanistan into something more like the U.S., to try to make Iraq into something more like the U.S., to try to make South Vietnam into something more like the U.S.— that’s a failed vision.

If people keep arguing that’s a possibility — because they believe we’ll do it better this time — then they’ve learned nothing from their failures.