Occam's Razor

The images all over the news and social media on Afghanistan are heart wrenching. It was made more so when the predictable happened: a suicide bomber affiliated with ISIS-K, an Afghani ISIS affiliate of sorts, killed thirteen U.S. soldiers and more than a hundred others outside the gates of Kabul’s airport. Everyone seems to be pointing fingers at Biden, as if there was ever a way to get us out of Afghanistan in a safe and orderly manner.

Lost among all the finger pointing and nervous nellies wondering about all the political implications is what, in general terms, has been a pretty good withdrawal, under the circumstances. We evacuated more than 100,000 people out of the country in only a few weeks, massively dwarfing the 7,000 of so when we hastily pulled out of Vietnam. Yes, we’re leaving some equipment behind but most of it is obsolete or had been rendered inoperative. The cost and hassle to remove this equipment, much of it by road, was more than the cost of leaving it there. Leaving behind equipment is standard practice when getting out of conflicts like this.

Biden is unlikely to pay much of a political price because Americans want us the hell out of there. A Hill-Harris poll, for example, shows 73% support for Biden’s actions. Generally, foreign policy is simply not a factor in elections, which turn mostly on local issues. You’d have to go back to 1968 to find an election where foreign policy was a major issue (Vietnam in this case). Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” for getting us out of Vietnam was likely why he won that election.

Even Donald Trump realized that staying in Afghanistan was a political loser, which is why he negotiated with the Taliban and released thousands of Taliban fighters. His agreement with the Taliban had some upsides. For example, the Taliban pretty much agreed to stop targeting our soldiers, an agreement they lived up to. Until the recent incident at Kabul’s airport, just three U.S. soldiers had died in Afghanistan in 2021.

Our withdrawal from Vietnam also suggests it will be quickly forgotten. Until Afghanistan, it had been our longest war. At the time (I was a teenager, so I remember), Vietnam fatigue was overwhelming. Virtually no one wanted us to stay there. Like in Afghanistan, South Vietnam’s government was wholly corrupt and there was no fixing it.

If you want to hold Biden responsible for something, it’s for putting too much faith in the Afghani army. The fall of Vietnam suggested Afghanistan too would fall quickly too. I was not the least bit surprised that the Taliban rolled into Kabul with virtually no opposition. I was also not surprised that Afghanistan’s president would slip away to a foreign country, reputedly with millions of dollars in secret bank accounts. The same was true with South Vietnam’s last “president”, Nguyen Van Thieu. What would have been surprising if it Afghanistan’s president Ghani stayed and fought it out.

The good news is that our returning soldiers should get a lot better treatment than those who served in Vietnam. Most were scorned for their service, and tried to hide that they had ever served in Vietnam. Many Americans took it out on our soldiers that we lost there, so a lot of these soldiers ended up depressed, unemployed and suicidal. Mostly though America wanted to forget Vietnam. At the time we were much more consumed by the oil embargo, the gas lines it brought and high inflation.

Of course, now we have a much bigger distraction: covid-19, the story that seems to never end. We’re starting wave number four and in many places hospitals are overrun with covid-19 patients. In Louisiana, residents are likely to suffer a double-whammy due to Hurricane Ida’s landfall.

It’s becoming impossible to ignore these events close to home as we are all impacted by them. A week ago it was Hurricane Henri that affected us locally. Fortunately being more than a hundred miles inland, its affect was minimal. These more powerful storms, not to mention forest fires in western stakes, bring smoke, haze and air pollution eastward. We just have to look outside our window to see issues that matter to us.

Frankly. most of us don’t give two hoots about the wreckage of our presence over nearly twenty years caused in Afghanistan. What we can say is that soon we’ll be wholly out of there, and that huge sunk cost estimated to have cost us $2T won’t enlarge.

After Vietnam, many political refuges (“boat people”) there fled to refugee camps in Thailand and off China. We’ll have over 100,000 refugees to handle this time around, so there will be recurring news items as processing that volume of people is bound to be tiring, time consuming and messy.

But mostly these will be a back page stories. Over time, Vietnamese refugees made new lives for themselves in the United States, and enriched our country with their talents, hard work and productivity. It is likely the same will be true with these Afghan refugees.

Should Biden run for reelection, I’m sure Republicans will raise the withdrawal as an issue. It’s just that almost nobody will care.