The Vietnam War’s Lessons Went Unlearned in Afghanistan
To students of history, the West’s withdrawal from a 20-year conflict is a sadly familiar tale.
The past is calling. It wants its lessons back.
Photographer: Bob Wildau/AFP via Getty Images
Four months from now, the last 2,500 American troops will have left Afghanistan. The British, Australians, Canadians and other allies will be in the same boat, figuratively if not literally, having also sacrificed blood and treasure in the 20-year struggle first, to remove Kabul’s Taliban government, thereafter to sustain its successor regimes. Why has President Joe Biden lost patience, the West essentially thrown up its hands in despair? We should recall a significant conversation, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“We want to be a benevolent and humble presence,” said U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, as U.S. troops forged through teeming crowds to enter Baghdad. Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson, embedded with Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division, captured the scene in his book, “In the Company of Soldiers”: