Under the baobab: Is the end of the Afghanistan war ‘deja vu all over again’? Not quite

Of all human endeavors war is among the worst. When one highly organized community decides to commit its resources to attack and destroy another community, things can get ugly. Bringing about the end of a war can be as disastrous as starting one.

For those few of us old enough to remember the end of the American involvement in the Vietnam War we are having “deja vu all over again.” But not quite. Over 50,000 Americans and between one and two million Vietnamese died in that war. The Vietnamese had already fought successful wars of liberation against the Japanese and their French colonizers. The U.S. stepped in after the French defeat at Diem Diem Phu.

Early on, one of the dominating factors of the conflict was the “domino theory,” which stated that if communism was not stopped in Nam it would overwhelm the other states of Southeast Asia. Hundreds of thousands of combat troop were committed. Our country was nearly torn asunder by internal disagreement over the moral legitimacy of the war. The media pictures of thousands of Vietnamese, stranded during the “Fall of Saigon” haunted Americans.

In the end Vietnam became a communist state but the rest of Southeast Asia didn’t. A few years later President Nixon initiated diplomatic relations with the largest communist presence in the region, China. They have evolved into one of our primary trading partners. I was working at the United Nations when Vietnam became a member of that family of nations. It was a cause for celebration.

Recently I visited the one of the primary battlefields and cemeteries of our most destructive war. Six to 800,000 thousand Americans died in the Civil War. Over 17,000 Union soldiers are buried in the Vicksburg National Cemetery in Mississippi, including my great-great grandfather. The vast majority of these men are in graves marked by numbers not names. Their identities are merged in the blood and the mud of the battlefield where they fell defending the Union and human freedom.

Yet even today the underlying principles of the Civil War are not resolved. Slavery was Constitutionally abolished but the equality of all people and their right to participate fully in their governance is being debated in some of our statehouses. The Union victory was sealed by battles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the recruitment of over 200,000 African Americans from 1863 to the end of the War in 1865. Freedom was not a gift but a hard-won victory by Black citizens.

Now we are witnessing the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is a lot more complicated than is immediately obvious. Some of the media images seem familiar — the besieged airport, thousands of folks desperate to escape the country, corrupt officials fleeing with ripped off public treasures. Others are new. At one point 80% of all illicit opium heroin was grown in Afghanistan. The money from that drug trade is part of the corrupting influence on all sides of the conflict.

The Afghani people have prevailed over two superpowers, the Russians and the U.S. Ironically America provided resources to help Afghani patriots drive the Russians from their country, including a Saudi mercenary named Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization. The Taliban have taken political power without hardly firing a shot. U.S. officials seemed shocked that the 200,000 troops that were trained and equipped at a cost of billions offered no resistance. The Colored regiments of the Civil War fought for freedom not money. In fact, for a while they were paid less than their white colleagues.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is ugly but as the President said, it will not get better next year. Perhaps we should consider the optics not when we end a war but when we start one.

This story was originally published August 23, 2021 at 7:00 AM.