The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

AT 12:30AM on Sunday morning, lightning struck the Washington Monument, perhaps the most distinctive memorial in America’s capital city that is full of them.

The pointed peak of the famous alabaster obelisk is crowned with devices designed to blunt the effects of such celestial fire, but the direct lightning strike nonetheless fried some of the interior electronics and the monument has been closed to visitors since the weekend.

At roughly the same time during a sultry Washington weekend, the American President declared an end to what is often described as his country’s longest war in Afghanistan. Some wonder if this was coincidental.

In the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on 9/11/2001, the US lashed out at the Middle East, Muslim terrorists in general and attack mastermind Osama bin Laden in particular, with bin Laden reportedly in hiding somewhere in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban forces that had controlled that mountain stronghold since the Soviet Army gave up its military occupation in 1991.

In a misbegotten occupation that began with a coup in 1978 and whose failure is cited as one of many factors contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russians and their allies spent a lot of money, military might and imperial prestige for only scant gains.

When the Soviet troops finally exited Afghanistan, the US and its Western allies were giddy with delight. They had, after all, armed and advised the rebels who drove the Soviet Army away. Moscow’s humiliating departure was another feather in the caps of Western military planners and budgetary spenders.

But after ten years of consolidated Taliban rule and the 9/11 attacks, America and its friends were singing a different tune.

Afghanistan, a collection of tribal fiefdoms of often spectacular beauty perched near the middle of the highest mountain range on earth, has richly earned its nickname as “a place where empires go to die”.

Undeterred by the still-recent Soviet failure – and that of many other empires that have attempted to subjugate this inhospitable territory for many centuries – the US launched a punitive, retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan in a search for bin Laden and to punish the nation for its collaboration with him.

While the unjustifiable, contemporaneous Iraq war proved to be a significant distraction, American operations in Afghanistan continued for 20 years, even after the capture and killing of bin Laden in May 2011.

Was Sunday’s lightning strike on the Washington Monument a divine sign that the post-World War II era of American military hegemony is over? Was it a dramatic exclamation point affirming the wisdom of President Joe Biden’s declaration of “no mas” for America in Afghanistan?

Or was it merely a meteorological exhortation to the arrogant American military and political leadership to stop acting as if the US can and should try to nation-build in remote areas far from home with no democratic traditions, fragile economies and questionable national allegiance from the population?

These and other questions are vying for attention in the American media with reports of successive devastating natural events in Haiti, continuing drought and wildfire deforestation in the American West, tropical storm dangers in the Southeast, and the continuing search for some kind of political accommodation in the US in the increasingly urgent hope of advancing the national interest.

Pundits and commentators from both the left and the right are piling on the defiant Biden for the clumsy and poorly planned and executed extraction from Afghanistan of American citizens and affiliated Afghans whose cooperation with the Americans likely marked them for retributive execution under the new Taliban government.

Images of chaos at the Kabul airport will remain in the minds of many Americans and others around the world for quite some time, and rightly so. Many will lament the blighted hope for Afghan women and girls who now seem certain to be forced back into what one commentator called “endless medieval midnight”.

Should the Americans be criticized for encouraging and trying to support the modernist secularization of a society riven with religious zealotry and tribal rivalries? Was the US right to add nation-building to an initially retaliatory military invasion?

Historians will debate this and it’s not clear now what their ultimate verdict might be. But Joe Biden’s decision to stop throwing more money, resources and military and contractor lives at a problem that is demonstrably insoluble must be regarded as the correct one.

He shouldn’t be blaming his inept predecessor or anyone else for the logistical failures. Those failures are obvious, and they rest with his administration. But the US had to get out of Afghanistan.

AND WE’VE SEEN IT ALL BEFORE

Many in and out of the US media are wringing their hands over comparisons to the ignominious departure of the Americans from Vietnam in April 1975.

There are certainly similarities. Of the many enduring images from the roughly 16-year American involvement in Vietnam, probably the most searing is of a naked child screaming and running away from the effects of a US napalm strike dropped on a remote rural village suspected of offering refuge to Vietcong fighters.

Another dramatic image depicted the shooting by a South Vietnamese policeman of an unarmed, handcuffed man in the middle of a street in broad daylight.

But the picture most often recalled in these chaotic Kabul days is of desperate Vietnamese clinging to the skids of an American helicopter as it evacuated staff from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon in April 1975.

The comparison of that image with the dozens of compelling pictures of similarly frightened Afghans swarming huge American transport planes as the US evacuation proceeds is compelling – and perhaps not misleading.

American military, political and economic efforts to nurture and construct democratic structures and representative governments in two nations far from home do lend themselves to easy comparison.

While the US intervention in Afghanistan was initially retaliatory and its involvement in Vietnam was not in response to such a dramatic provocation as the 9/11 attacks, the American efforts in both nations did assume many of the same aspects over the course of time.

The “model” of grass-roots development of a new national structure followed broadly similar lines in both places. The idea was that a militarily won and enforced peace would provide an incubator for democratic government. Language-qualified American and allied civilian advisers would be deployed far from the safety of embassy bastions to offer hands-on advice and assistance.

Free and fair elections would follow, and durable societies would arise to align with Western values and economic systems.

This would be a natural development. In Washington and many other Western European and Commonwealth capitals, we do believe that representative democracy and free-market capitalism represent mankind’s best hope.

The events unfolding before our eyes in Kabul and the almost inconceivably rapid collapse of the prior Afghan government do seem to belie the presumed universal appeal of these assumptions.

These are questions to be addressed in the avalanche of post-game analysis with which we will soon be presented.

Meanwhile, profound differences between the American experience in Vietnam and Afghanistan defy some of the comparisons now being offered.

Vietnam more closely resembled World War II and Korea in its reliance on “conventional” military strategy with large land forces supported by air and sea power. At one point, the US had over half a million troops deployed on the ground in Vietnam. The largest American ground presence in Afghanistan never exceeded one-fifth of that total.

America’s Vietnam War was also waged by an army comprised of both volunteers and conscripts. The military draft meant that most young American men faced enrolment in the “selective service system” at the age of 18, and for millions of them, conscription into the army and possible deployment to the jungles of Vietnam.

Young men faced involuntary and often unwelcome military service in a widely unpopular war. Their resistance resulted in the chaos and tumult that dominated the US for a decade until the draft was basically decommissioned in 1973.

Because the American military now favours a more remote-controlled approach to distant foreign engagements, only slightly more than 2,300 American volunteer soldiers have died in Afghanistan. In Vietnam, 58,000 perished.

What lessons will America and its allies learn from this week’s events?