AfghanisNAM

In November, 1964 my buddies and I were invited to dinner at the home of a french family in Brest, France. We were there after being at sea during Operation Steel Pike (ref:Wikipedia).  Our frenchman host had been in the french army and had fought in Indochina.  He described his experiences in that war as brutal and unwinnable. The French were thoroughly defeated at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew shortly after from their colony.
After a lovely dinner we settled in the living room; enjoyed cognac and discussed politics. Our host finally brought up a subject that none of us knew much about; the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. He wanted to know what we knew of the conditions there and how we saw US intentions. I admitted not knowing very much about the situation other than our military role was advisory-supposedly helping the Republic of South Vietnam but that the Gulf of Tonkin incident this summer was serious. As we were saying our goodnights our host gave us a warning. “You will never win in a war against guerillas who have strong wills and a sense of timelessness.”         We all know how our involvement in Vietnam turned out. 58,220 killed,153,393 wounded, $1 trillion spent. Now we buy many of our consumer goods from Vietnam.                                                                                                                                                                                 Here we are in 2021 going through the very same situation in Afghanistan we did in Vietnam in 1975.  (Remember Batista’s fleeing Cuba in The Godfather.).  $2 trillion wasted, 2448 killed, over 20,000 wounded.   How many times must we relearn the same lessons over again. We can”t “nation build” or even try to change “hearts and minds”.  Our military/industrial complex is the only winner and our policy makers from both parties continue to fail.

Comments

  1. Beth PreddySeptember 7, 2021 at 7:02 AM

    Oh my, I wrote a long comment and it is deleted because I didn't publish. Read Just In and Jawbreaker. Both detail the CIA and Special Forces entry in the days after 9-11. Our goal: Kill bin Laden and defeat the Taliban. We claimed we did the latter, took Kabul, but stayed in the country to nation build. They did not want us, not just the Taliban, but also the Afghan people. What a waste. Definitely not the Kabul described in The Kite Runner before the Taliban took over in the nineties.

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  2. Beth PreddySeptember 7, 2021 at 7:08 AM

    One more thing: What is your opinion of the evacuation? Or was it a surrender? I heard Joe Scarborough this morning express pride at how we, our soldiers, handled it. It was really a feat, and how are the 13 heroes who died on Biden? It was a suicide bomber.

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