My generation thought we had a problem finding the exit ramp from Vietnam. LBJ’s White House tapes showed no daylight between his public handwringing and what he said to his closest advisors in private, that his position on withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam was not centered on “whether” but on “how.”
John Kerry, testifying for Vietnam Veterans Against the War before a Senate committee, famously answered,
Ships and planes, Senator, ships and planes.
That was a clever remark, but it went the way of Kerry’s later presidential campaign.
In 2004, Kerry was a senator from Massachusetts, running on withdrawal from Afghanistan as being not a question of whether, but of how. We had been there since 2001, when the Taliban government that sheltered Osama bin Laden had been deposed. Bin Laden’s trail had gone cold since a very close call in the caves of Tora Bora.
The caves are located near a part of the Pakistan border dominated by tribal warlords, few of whom hold any loyalty to the central government. Even if they did, Pakistanis only took our side against al Qaeda because President George W. Bush gave them no choice. If they did not list themselves as with us, he would list them as against us.
During a Senate hearing on withdrawal from Afghanistan, Kerry made the mistake of wondering “how” to get out. The fact that Afghanistan is land-locked did not stop several wags around the room from saying — accidentally in unison:
Ships and planes, Senator, ships and planes.
I do hope Sen. Kerry remains in the Vietnam time warp where that memory cast him long enough to reflect on the iconic photo of the U.S. withdrawal: a helicopter lifting off from the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon trailing a line of panicked Vietnamese trying to flee for their lives. Trying. Clinging to the skids until kicked off.
Those people, without exception, were facing dire consequences for throwing in with the United States in the war where our adversaries claimed the mantle of freedom and self-determination. They were born into a society where a Catholic and French-speaking minority-dominated Buddhists who may or may not have learned a language in addition to Vietnamese.
The immediate enemy — that’s us — had knowingly stepped into the shoes of their colonial masters after Vietnamese fighting for Vietnam beat the French at Dien Bien Phu. At the time of the French defeat, the United States was picking up 80 percent of the French costs because the Viet Minh were on the Communist side in the struggle with capitalism for world domination.
During the siege of Dien Bien Phu, the U.S. (in addition to monetary support) lent aircraft for delivery of supplies, mostly flown by French crews. Thirty-seven U.S. pilots are known to have flown in the airlift; two were killed in action. In 2005, the seven pilots still living were awarded the French Legion of Honor.
In the ensuing treaty negotiations in Geneva, 1954, the French gave up not just Vietnam, but all their colonies in Indochina. Vietnam was not exactly freed except in the sense the French colonial regime was gone. The Vietnamese nation was partitioned between two strong men, Ho Chi Minh in the north and Bao Dai in the south. The partition was to end in 1956 with national elections, which were not held because Ho Chi Minh remained the most powerful Vietnamese politician.
When the elections didn’t happen, a civil war did, in which the U.S. supporters were on the defensive from the get-go. The U.S. styled the dispute an invasion of “free” South Vietnam by Communist North Vietnam. As U.S. involvement escalated to direct combat, there were more jobs for people bilingual in English. It would be up to the prevailing Vietnamese to decide how many of these people should spend time in “re-education camps” and how many were incorrigible traitors who could only be shot.
It’s too late for the Vietnamese we abandoned to that process. The ones we evacuated to the U.S. have, as a group, been valuable citizens.
Now we stand on the cusp of the same process taking place when the Taliban re-take the cities of Afghanistan. (They already have most of the countryside.) Some of us think that betrayal of those Afghans who helped us is not admirable conduct.
The Taliban, however, will be much less likely to turn educated Afghans loose than the North Vietnamese were when evaluating South Vietnamese. Most Vietnamese, North and South, got their basic education and sometimes university education in France. Ho Chi Minh’s official biography lists only the Soviet-funded Communist University of the Toilers of the East, but he was a published author before Toiler University, and he had been exposed to the same French ideas that influenced U.S. revolutionaries.
A substantial number of the Taliban consider education beyond basic reading and writing to be haram, inappropriate for observant Muslims. This is an absurd perversion of mainstream Islam, and it’s not even clear how many Taliban go that far, except when the person being evaluated is female. And here we smack into an issue that needs even more work than protection of Afghans who cast their lot with the U.S.
There is already a bombing campaign against girls’ schools in Afghanistan. I thought they had hit one school with no girls, but this afternoon the news said that school segregates students by gender, with the boys going in the morning and the girls in the afternoon. The bomb detonated in the afternoon.
The helo on the embassy roof in Saigon was a long time ago. The last demonstration of U.S. reliability was not. I speak of the Trump administration using Syrian Kurds to destroy the Islamic State and then rewarding the Kurds by leaving them at the mercy of Turkey. It could be that rational Afghans do not expect much of us.
(Russell digression
Some years ago, I was walking around the square in Bloomington, Indiana. I was teaching at Indiana University and I got a visit from a Texas lawyer who was not an academic.
We were reading the menus posted on the doors of various eateries. I stopped in front of one and gave it a hearty recommendation. The food on offer was the cuisine of Afghanistan, and I had eaten there in the past.
My visitor — who, incidentally, never served in the military — was visibly upset. Did I not understand, he wanted to know, that we have been at war with Afghanistan for years? I was shocked into some long seconds of silence before I offered:
Dude, who do you think gets to come to the American Midwest from Afghanistan and open a restaurant? You think this guy is with the Taliban?
He was my guest, and I did not try to take him somewhere he did not want to go. We picked a different place. To me, though, this is of-a-piece with the KKK burning Vietnamese shrimp boats on the Texas coast.
Life in the U.S. is not going to be a cakewalk for all the Afghans we are able to evacuate. However, they will be unlikely to get killed and we do, here in the U.S., educate our daughters.)
It’s been 20 years, and I see no reason to think the lay of the land will change in another 20 years. It is foreseeable that the Taliban will be in Kabul before we know it.
I write to suggest we show more loyalty to the Afghans who supported us than we did to the Kurds. And that we think about what we can do with Afghan girls who want to go to school. It could be that the Afghans don’t expect much of us, given what happened to the Vietnamese and the Kurds.
I would hope we expect more of ourselves.
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Previously Published on Medium
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