Being older than dirt — I turn 68 this coming Earth Day — I can remember the politics in the United States over the War in Vietnam. #NeverTrumper and neoconservative Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist, knows something about it as well.
Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal could be the first step to a Taliban takeover
Opinion by Max Boot | April 13, 2021 | 4:18 PM EDT
For South Vietnamese refugees, this month will always be known as “Black April.” In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon had concluded a one-sided peace deal with North Vietnam that led the United States to pull all of its troops out of South Vietnam while allowing the Communists to maintain 150,000 of their troops there. Hanoi began to violate the Paris Peace Accords as soon as they were signed, while the war-weary United States cut back aid to the South.
The result was a North Vietnamese offensive that resulted in the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. The U.S. military had to hastily evacuate American personnel and some of the South Vietnamese they had worked most closely with. But hundreds of thousands of our allies were confined to brutal reeducation camps and hundreds of thousands more took to the seas as “boat people.” Many died while trying to flee.
President Biden was already in the Senate when this tragedy transpired. Yet he risks a repeat of this fiasco with his fateful decision, revealed Tuesday in The Post, to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11.
Mullah Mohammed Omar
The ancient Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus attributed to the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus the expression, “They make a solitude, and call it peace,” frequently expressed as “They make a desert and call it peace.”
The expression was used a lot during the War in Vietnam. Another came from an old political science professor of mine, Ernest Yanarella, concerning the Viet Cong: “They were more willing to die for their country than we were willing to keep killing them.”
And it seems to be true in Afghanistan as well: the only way to truly defeat the Taliban is how our allies and we defeated Germany and Japan: we killed so many of their fighting-aged men, wounded millions more, and thoroughly cowed the boys too young to fight but growing up, we destroyed their economy and their infrastructure, we rained down so much fire and steel that Germany and Japan simply couldn’t continue to fight.
We did not do that to the Vietnamese Communists, and we have not done it to the Taliban, because we just don’t want to keep killing and killing and killing. But if we are not willing to do that, there is no other alternative that gives us some sort of victory in Afghanistan.
It’s time to leave. Heck, it was time to leave ten years ago! There is simply nothing to be gained by staying.
So, yes, the Taliban will almost certainly win; so what? They will ban girls from being educated, they will set up a ridiculously repressive Islamist regime, they will kill their enemies and cow those who remain alive. But at some point we have to say, that’s their business, and not ours.
Our entry into Afghanistan wass doomed from day one. We had no business there then and still don’t. Sadly, you must keep in mind we now have an illegal Junta in the WH. A junta comprised of leftists. If we leave Afghanistan they will invade something else. It’s their nature.
It was no surprise to me that neoconservative #NeverTrumper Bill Kristol, the founder and eventual killer of The Weekly Standard, wants us to stay there as well:
Most of the comments on his tweet are similar to mine: there’s nothing more we can accomplish there.
When Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot and Bill Kristol all agree on something, you know it’s wrong.
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