March 31, 2021, was the scheduled last day for U.S. military forces to be in Afghanistan. Acting on a plan put in place by the last administration, the Biden Administration activated the withdrawal of military forces from that war-torn country and plans are in place to remove our physical diplomatic presence as well.
The withdrawal did not go smoothly. The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISK) mounted a bombing attack that killed scores of Afghans and 13 U.S. military near the airport in Kabul as people thronged to depart the country. As of this writing, there have been two U.S. reprisal strikes, and there is likely to be more violence from all sides. As a veteran of the Vietnam withdrawal of 1973-75, I was not surprised at this turn of events.
As anyone who has ever been in a war can tell you, if they are being honest, it’s much easier to start a war than end it. Starting a conflict only requires one side to open fire and the other to respond in kind. Once the fighting starts, though, all bets are off, especially when dealing with an enemy whose aim it to destroy you, or in conditions of asymmetric warfare, where one side has a firepower advantage causing the other side to use nontraditional means of fighting like suicide bombings.
Afghanistan is also orders of magnitude more complex and dangerous than Vietnam. In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese and their western allies fought the North Vietnamese and their clients the Viet Cong. In Afghanistan the opposition consists of the Taliban, who we ousted when we invaded after 9/11, and the ISK, which hates the Taliban and wishes to use Afghanistan to expand its caliphate to Central and South Asia.
The Taliban does not, or did not, have complete control over its own forces and has none over ISK. Under these conditions, withdrawal from a war zone that includes thousands of foreign noncombatants as well as Afghans who worked with the U.S. and rightfully fear for their lives which is always challenging, is fraught with immense danger. There is no way to know who will fire the last shot or at whom that shot will be fired.
While the politicians posture and try to assign blame – purely for domestic political purposes – our troops, diplomats, NGOs trying to help the Afghan people, and the Afghans themselves suffer and die. To the survivors of deadly attacks, the families of those not so lucky, and those cowering in fear for their lives, it matters little whose fault it is. They want to know what’s going to be done to help them get through another day.
Even when the war that’s ending was fought by disciplined forces, the chances of post-conflict casualties during the withdrawal exists. Witness the chaotic withdrawal from Vietnam when Saigon fell. Hordes of Vietnamese rushed the American embassy begging to be taken out of the country for fear that they would be subject to reprisals by the North Vietnamese conquerors. The reeducation camps showed that to be correct for many.
This was a disciplined foe, so imagine the chaos in a situation like Afghanistan where the Taliban can’t control some of their own people and have zero control over ISK fighters who view them as enemies as much as they view the Americans.
Anyone who thought ending the war – which officially ended with the departure of the last US military flight on August 31, 2021, bringing to an end America’s longest war – was seriously deluded.
I’m pretty sure the intelligence community was aware of the possibility of attacks by ISK at least, and potentially by Taliban fighters who disagree violently with their leadership even talking to the enemy.
Now that we’re out, I predict that things will only get worse. There will be a long period of darkness before any kind of dawn.
That’s something to think about before you start any war. How will it end? However it ends, you can bet it won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty. That only happens in the movies. – NWI
