Afghanistan is another Donald Trump failed foriegn policy

Opinion echo published in The Week, March 13, 2020, by Theunis Bates, the managing editor.

This particular echo opinion is personal in my family because my husband Richard is a Vietnam War Veteran. 

During the war, he was in Chu Lai, Vietnam with Mobile Construction Batallion 71, in 1967, as described by photojournalist and author David Lyman in his book "Seabee 71 in Chu Lai: Memoir of a Navy Journalist".

Afghanistan in 2020, is starting to look a lot like Vietnam in 1973.  

(Maine Writer- my family was living in Subic Bay, Philippines during the fall of Saigon. My husband was stationed at Subic at the time and we lived on the Navy Base with our family. We witnessed the waves of Vietnamese refugees who arrived by the thousands at the Cubi Naval Air Station and those who came in boats, called "the boat people". We participated in humanitarian efforts to count and process the refugees who flew into Subic.)

In 1973, with no input from South Vietnam's pro-U.S.  government, President Richard Nixon signed a deal with North Vietnam to speed America's exit from a deeply unpopular "forever war".

The Trump administration struck a similar accord with the Afghan Taliban this week, also with minimal buy-in from our local allies.  In return for vague Taliban promises to shun al-Qada and talk poer sharing with the government in Kabul, the U.S. will withdraw its 12,000 troops over the next 14 months.  History tells us what's likely to happen next.  Two years after Nixon inked his accord, the North Vietnamese overran Saigon and sent hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to re-education camps. Should the U.S. quit Afghanistan, the Taliban may take Kabul not long after. If they do, bloody reprisals are certain and the women in the U.S. encouraged to leave their homes, attend schools and work will be forced back into the Middle Ages.

Many Afghans will rightly feel betrayed by our departure.  Yet, by most measures, America's nearly 20-year-old war there is a failure. We did annihilate the al Qaida terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks and toppled the Taliban government that sheltered them. But, the Taliban- which have a strong base of support among the country's ethnic Pashtuns- have surged back and now control 50 percent of the country.  Our efforts to create a thriving democracy have also amounted to nothing.  

In fact, the Kabul government is riddled with corruption and hugely unpopular, and much of the territory it supposedly controls is dominated by warlords, deeply involved in opium trafficking. 

Moreover, Afghanistan has already cost us $2 trillion and the lives of 2,300 American troops, so, obviously, more blood and treasure won't buy victory.  Nixon once promised that he would deliver "peace with honor" in Vietnam. We should know that no such thing is possible in Afghanistan.