Originally posted July 13, 2021. Reposted without edits.
As US forces continue to withdraw from Afghanistan, at times literally fleeing in the dead of night1, the Taliban launched a sweeping offensive that has already attained fairly spectacular gains. When its delegation visited Moscow a few days ago, Taliban spokesmen claimed that the movement now controlled approximately 85% of the country. Certainly it has captured much, if not most, of the territory adjoining Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan, prompting the latter as well as Russia to mobilise additional troops to the region. It is tempting, at this juncture, to suggest that the shelf life of the Afghan government in Kabul is now measured in weeks if not days, however without much by way of data on either the remaining loyalist forces or the size and disposition of the various Taliban contingents, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions. In any case, the fact that most of the 16 thousand American mercenaries2 – primarily instructors, mechanics and other kinds of support staff rather than actual combat units – have been withdrawn over the past several weeks3 suggests a rather low level of confidence in the Afghan army’s ability to protect them even before the Taliban’s latest offensive.
Naturally, such a dramatic collapse of an American client regime brings to mind immediate comparisons with the fall of South Vietnam, formally the Republic of Vietnam (the “RVN”), in the spring of 1975, complete with the iconic photograph of American helicopters evacuating scores of persons from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Certainly, should the regime in Kabul fall, the Republicans will waste no time in attempting to associate the Biden administration with the “second fall of Saigon”, while various television channels are bound to air some shallow documentaries on the collapse of the RVN so as to exploit the historical parallel.
Of notable interest to me, however, is the key difference between the RVN and the present US-installed government in Afghanistan, which, in turn, highlights perhaps the most important similarity between the two situations, one that might not necessarily be the focus of much mainstream media coverage.
Consider the background of the RVN. The French had captured various regions of Indochina in the second half of the 19th century, and proceeded to control them almost all through the Second World War. While sporadic rebellions did take place from time to time, on the whole, French dominance over the region was unquestioned for several generations. As such, by the 1940s there emerged several whole layers of Vietnamese society that depended on or actively supported the colonial regime – socio-economic elites and affluent professionals, native functionaries in the colonial administration, a whole slew of working-class persons in service to the French and their local collaborators, whether as maids, soldiers or prostitutes, possibly at least some of the local intellectual class as well. It is the same in every colonial setting, at least, where the native population is not exterminated or expelled outright, and it is these layers that frequently serve as the foundation of a nominally independent post-colonial state that remains nevertheless tightly connected to its former masters. So it was with the State of Vietnam created by the French in 1949, much of which was then rolled into the pro-American RVN after the French withdrew from the region following their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In turn, the RVN lasted for another 20 some years, with the rapidity of its collapse in 1975 taking by surprise even the North Vietnamese assailing it.
Compared with the last two decades of American involvement in Afghanistan, then, the RVN seems a veritable pillar of post-colonial stability. Furthermore, it never had to face the sort of rampant warlordism and regional fracturing that became endemic in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s defeat and withdrawal to neighbouring Pakistan in 2001-2002. Moreover, the Taliban is not a conventional army, with tanks, aircraft and the like, nor is it likely to have a quarter of a million men under arms with many thousands more in reserve, and its current offensive can hardly be compared in intensity with that which fell upon the RVN in the spring of 1975.
So what happened?
There are two competing, or perhaps complementary, explanations here. The first is strictly material. As the US withdrew not only its forces but all manner of logistical and financial support, both the RVN and the Afghan government lost its ability to keep their respective opponents at bay via superior American-provided weapons and firepower. For example, having much of one’s helicopter force grounded due to lack of spare parts or qualified technicians, whether in Afghanistan today4 or in the RVN several decades ago, rather goes a long way towards eliminating any sort of advantage on the battlefield. The corollary, of course, is that the Afghans or the South Vietnamese might have held on had their helicopters been kept flying, their artillery firing, and so on.
However, one cannot help but question this latter assertion. Can decades of colonial, or quasi-colonial, subservience really produce a national elite that is likely to fight an encroaching enemy instead of running – back to their past, or present, masters – at the first sign of trouble? Can a quasi-colonial state produce an army that is independently motivated enough to fight, and win, what is effectively a kind of a civil war? What incentive is there to even try and do so, when, for decades, both this elite and this army would have been trained to rely on their masters’ help, and even direct intervention, to see them through any crisis5? Put like this, it almost sounds as if decades of colonial rule might produce a sort of learned helplessness, tempered by unbridled corruption in both government and the military – while always having, at least one’s mind’s eye, a sort of an “out” should things suddenly go sour. There is certainly no patriotism here, no loyalty to a cause aside from self-enrichment, or, in the case of the working people servicing the regime, getting by without starving.
In other words, simply having weapons is not enough, there must be enough both soldiers and generals who would want to use them. And here, I suspect, one comes upon one of the endemic problems of puppet states – that without someone actively pulling their strings, they are rarely, if ever, able to keep upright.
- St. John, R., “What did the U.S. leave behind at Bagram Airfield?”, LA Times, July 7, 2021, reprinted by Yahoo News, accessed July 9, 2021.[↩]
- Termed “contractors” in the mainstream press.[↩]
- See McLeary, P., “Biden is betting big on Afghanistan’s air force. But their problems continue to grow.”, Politico, July 10, 2021, retrieved July 13, 2021.[↩]
- Ibid.[↩]
- Notably, almost through the end the RVN’s leadership apparently kept on hoping for a renewed American bombing campaign against North Vietnam to save them from defeat.[↩]