Expert Eyewitness Concludes Afghanistan is Saigon 2.0 On Steroids
Albert Turkington
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In what seems to be a very conscientious attempt to outdo past military blunders and be crowned one of the biggest dunces of history, the Biden regime has floundered so spectacularly in America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan that some have compared it to the withdrawal of American troops and Vietnamese allies in Saigon in 1975, but without any semblance of order and planning.
Indeed, according to The Epoch Times, former Chicago Tribune correspondent Ron Yates recalls the scene in the Saigon during the last months of American military presence and compares it far favorably to the quagmire currently unfolding in the graveyard of empires. Yates recalls that “They managed to get a lot of people out,” in Vietnam, and in contrast, sees the equivalent exercise in Afghanistan as the polar opposite of Saigon, saying that “It’s an unmitigated disaster,”.
With regards to evacuating American personnel and Afghan collaborators with targets on their backs as what took place in Saigon, Yates criticizes the botched operation saying that “They had months to do this. Why couldn’t they have begun this process three or four months ago, slowly taking out these Afghans who were going to be, probably targeted by the Taliban after they took over?”. At some point, geopolitical blunders become so farcical that the assumption of stupidity on the part of our rulers ceases to be a reasonable one, and many believe that this example is a case of the elites crossing the border from just being stupid to being undoubtedly dubious and evil.
To make matters worse, it would seem that Afghanistan has an even less optimal cultural infrastructure from which to build a modern, Western-style democracy and market economy than even Vietnam. While still an autocratic one-party state, Vietnam has nevertheless managed to build a fast-developing “Socialist-oriented Market Economy” (their words) that is close to eliminating absolute poverty in the country. Vietnam has also been able to spend what little it has to produce youngsters that now do better in the PISA tests than most Western European countries, which many believe means that Vietnam has a lot of catch-up development ahead of them. And yet, even a country with the cultural infrastructure such as Vietnam was not enamored to embrace a Western political system despite being privy to it from both the Americans and the French.
At the very least, the South Vietnamese were willing to put up a fight against the northern communist aggressors, resulting in thousands of more casualties as the Viet Cong came down on them. But instead of holding their own for several months, the American-trained Afghan military simply either went home or joined the Taliban as they approached their strongholds. It would not seem unreasonable to postulate that the Afghan population might be much more ideologically susceptible to theocracy than previously thought.
One might be wiser to participate in the lottery than to expect Afghanistan to become lovers of constitutional government at this point. But do not expect our rulers to learn their lesson this time around.
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