The Story of A Fall

Contrary to what President Biden has stated in the past what we are witnessing in Afghanistan is a historical repeat of the Saigon moment, but in grander scale. I witnessed, via media footage American military helicopters evacuating our embassy in Kabul. The footage invoked striking similarities with the 1975 retreat from Vietnam’s Saigon. President Joe Biden rejected any similarities between the past and current hasty pullouts. As a retired Army Officer (65-95), I cannot help but see Vietnam emanations of the ongoing retreat even more embarrassing, however, given that Biden had explicitly promised that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would not turn into another fall of Saigon. To add insult to injury, Biden insisted early in July that the Taliban’s capabilities were “not remotely comparable” to the North Vietnamese forces and no hasty retreat would happen. Now for the rest of the story. The story of a fall… It all began with the death of innocent people, ended with the death of innocent people. I can still recall the images of innocent people falling from New York City’s World Trade Center Towers on 9/11 and more recently innocent Afghans falling from US military aircraft on 8/18. It is debatable if the events of September 11, 2001, could have been prevented. There is little doubt the events that led to people falling from a U.S. Air Force C17 Transport Plane following takeoff from Kabul, could have been prevented had the Operation Plan outlined an extraction plan in the appropriate annex. 

Biden’s blame game includes the Afghan Army’s unwillingness to hold the line and fight the Taliban to the end. I ask Biden and you the reader, why do you suppose the American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years faded into obscurity following the encirclement of Kabul? Could it be the Afghan troops apparently calculated that their own paltry chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States, despite its powerful diversity training programs?

Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon, and politically weaponized intelligence communities. And why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American oil and gas extractors and the Saudis, only to beg the Kingdom to rush to export more of its loathed oil before the U.S. midterms? Why not, when Biden asks Russia’s Putin to request that Russian-related hackers be a little less raucous in their selection of U.S. targets? And why not, when our own military spars with the mercurial “cancel culture” blatherskites of “white supremacy” as Afghans fall from U.S. military jets in fatal desperation to reach such a supposedly racist nation?