~~ Written by dmorista ~~
When comparing the collapse of the American / NATO client state of South Vietnam, in the period after the last American military unit left that country, to the current collapse taking place in Afghanistan; it is breathtaking how much faster the process is taking place now as compared to that process from 48 to 46 years ago. The last U.S. military unit left Vietnam on March 29, 1973 and the final collapse of the puppet regime took place on April 30, 1975; thus the “Republic of Vietnam”, as the South Vietnamese state was officially named, lasted 25 months after the last standard overt U.S. military unit was withdrawn. In Afghanistan the U.S. announced a few weeks ago that it will pull the last military units out on August 30. The Taliban has responded to that announcement with an offensive that has taken place while the last U.S. and a few residual NATO units are still in Afghanistan. As of this writing something like 20 “provincial capitals” have fallen to the Taliban in the last few days, and the Taliban already controls over ⅔ of the land area of Afghanistan. Already some analysts are predicting that the Taliban will actually take the national capital of Kabul within 90 days. Actually it looks like that eventuality might occur much more quickly than that. Recent forecasts by U.S. Governmental analysts, as of the morning of August 13, 2021 (in the wake of Taliban takeovers of Kandahar and Herat the second and third largest cities in the country), now forecast that the Afghan Client Government might only last for 30 days.
The iconic photo of the chaotic collapse scenario in South Vietnam, in its final hours in the Client State’s Capital city of Saigon is here below. The photo is widely, but mistakenly, believed to have been taken at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. It is in fact a photo of a desperate crowd of collaborators in line to board a helicopter, to be flown out to the U.S. Naval ships standing offshore. However, actually the photo is of an apartment building where the CIA’s Deputy Chief of Station, and numerous other United States Agency for International Development (USAID) personnel, lived and that had become an ad hoc location for contending with the desperate Vietnamese, associated with the U.S., as they crowded in to any location where they thought they could try to escape their likely fate if they remained in Vietnam.
Of course large numbers of Vietnamese collaborators also flocked to the American Embassy where the Embassy Staff, in the person of the Marine Guard reinforced with other military personnel, cut down some trees on the Embassy Grounds to make space for a helicopter landing pad next to the Embassy buildings. The Embassy did not resort to using the roof until the very end when the last couple of helicopters landed on the Embassy building’s roof to pick up the “rear guard” members of the Embassy’s security detail. That was while the triumphant Vietnamese Communist forces and sympathizers were scaling the fence that surrounded the Embassy and were beginning to occupy the Embassy grounds. Even this morning on NPR and over the past few days of the panicky news and analysis broadcasts I keep hearing that helicopters embarked numerous people from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. This is a bunch of malarkey and has become an integral part of the Mythology surrounding the ignominious end of the Republic of Vietnam, the Client State in that long and horrific war.
Another set of famous photos showed U.S. naval personnel pushing helicopters over the sides of various U.S. Aircraft Carriers as those helicopters got in the way of yet more incoming helicopters that wanted to land with yet more escaping South Vietnamese.
The last month or so of the existence of the Republic of Vietnam was a period of chaos. Desperate Vietnamese, who had collaborated with the Americans and the French, stampeded various venues trying to leave. Vietnam had been wracked by an over 30 year long war, its society distorted and perverted to serve the wants and needs of occupiers and collaborators for decades. IndoChina had been controlled by the colonial French, then the Japanese who worked with the colonial French and the Americans as WW 2 wound down, then the Colonial French again (this time bankrolled by the Americans); then for over 10 years after the Geneva Agreements, the North was run by the forces derived from the Vietminh, and from 1955 - 1963, the South was run by an interloper, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been residing in a Maryknoll Monastery in upstate New York; the client regime imposed by the U.S. changed with a variety of characters heading it up after the assassinaton of the Diem and his brother in 1963.
In some ways the situation in Afghanistan resembles that of South Vietnam. Afghanistan had actually been developing like a fairly typical poor country. In the 1950s and 1960s in the Capital City Kabul middle class women were prominent in the professions; and most of them wore western clothes and had eschewed the burkha and the chador. Smaller cities were less liberal but the real reservoir of conservative socioeconomic relations was in the villages and the rural areas that had not changed at all. By 1972 the Soviets had assisted a Left-leaning government to take power in Afghanistan and it attempted to bring some reforms to the ultra-conservative and fanatically religious country side. Afghanistan was buffeted and manipulated by outside powers from 1972 on and by the late 1970s the U.S. was running covert operations to support an assortment of extreme right-wing supposedly religiously based operatives. A video clip shows Zbigniew Brzeziński (Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor) exhorting Mujahideen figures at a meeting on a hillside in Afghanistan to take violent action. The result of the early machinations by the Carter administration and much more vigorous action by the Reagan Administration was the First Afghan War Not coincidentally the mid to late 1970s saw the move of poppy cultivation and heroin production from the Golden Triangle, near Vietnam, to Central Asia particularly in Afghanistan though in Pakistan to a smaller degree as well.
Of course the immediate justification for attacking Afghanistan was the events of September 11, 2001. An earlier iteration of the Taliban was running Afghanistan then, and they offered to turn over Osama Bin Laden for trial, to a neutral country, if the U.S. presented credible proof of his involvement in the events of 9-11. Proof the U.S. never did provide, as it merely attacked Afghanistan beginning on October 7, 2001 using the 9-11 events as the pretext. The real reasons for the U.S. attack on Afghanistan are to be found in control of the Opium Poppy trade and the Heroin business, in which the CIA had been implicated going back to the late 1940s in Turkey, Sardinia, Sicily, and Marseilles, France. (See, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred McCoy, Lawrence Hill Books; Revised edition {April 1, 1991} ), McCoy discusses the move of the production area for the Poppy / Heroin business from the Golden Triangle of SE Asia to Afghanistan in the revised edition. The presence of large deposits of rare earth minerals in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan was also well-known to U.S. business and strategic planners. Another issue was the potential plan for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline to bring oil and/or natural gas down from the Caspian Sea area and out to embarkation points on the Indian Ocean for sale to fast growing East and South Asian markets, without crossing Iran. American political and security leaders promised the Taliban a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs according to their cooperation in that venture. The Second U.S. - Afghan War used a minimum of ground forces and a maximum of air attacks. The largely CIA, Special Forces, and mercenary operation was shunted aside by the much larger, and strategically more important and central, attack on Iraq in 2003.
Looming up we see some sort of investment and siege of Kabul looking likely. Typical of various U.S. / Western client regimes the Afghans controlled the cities while the Taliban controlled much of the rural area of Afghanistan. Most of the secondary cities have been taken by the Taliban including numerous provincial capitals. This is similar to the end of the U.S. client state in Vietnam, where most of the Republic of Vietnam’s secondary cities had already been taken by the Communist forces; before they began a final push to take Saigon and total control of the Republic of Vietnam during the last 2 months of its existence. This is clearly shown in the Map below, the somewhat wider red arrows denote the movement of Communist forces during the last 2 months. Those movements were almost all directed at Saigon for a culminating battle for control of the Client State Capital city and the largest city in all of Vietnam.
(Source: “Fall of Saigon”, Wikipedia, at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon >)
A series of 4 Maps below shows the change over time of the control of the country by the Client Government, the Taliban, and those that are contested. The maps run from November 2017 to August 14, 2021. The deterioration of the Client Government of Afghanistan is clearly evident. According to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (an imperialist pro-Zionist NGO financed by the U.S. primarily through the CIA), the Taliban controlled 73 districts on November 28, 2017 and they control 256 as of August 14, 2021. Conversely, the Client Government of Afghanistan controlled 217 districts on November 28, 2017, and they controlled only 59 as of August 14, 2021. Clearly the Taliban is closing in on Kabul for the final climactic battle; for the Capital and largest city of Afghanistan.
(Source: “Mapping Taliban Contested and Controlled Districts in Afghanistan”, “Weekly time lapse video of the Taliban’s Advance | Apr 13 to Present”, “Map of Afghanistan’s districts, updated daily”, Bill Roggio, FDD’s Long War Journal, at < https://www.longwarjournal.org/mapping-taliban-control-in-afghanistan >)
(Source: “Map of the Status of Afghanistan’s provinces”, Bill Roggio, FDD’s Long War
Journal, at < https://www.longwarjournal.org/mapping-taliban-control-in-afghanistan >)
The end of the Client Afghan state appears imminent. The Taliban, who are replacing them, are a harsh bunch and I would not want to live under their aegis. We can ask why is this happening so much faster in Afghanistan than did the similar process that took place some 37 years ago in Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. was wracked by massive anti-war demonstrations and, more importantly; the U.S. military after 5 years of deployment in a colonial war type situation collapsed into insubordination, refusal to obey orders, rampant drug use, sabotage of equipment, and even the killing of unpopular officers (there were at least a couple of hundred cases of this and likely more). The “all-volunteer” current day U.S. military did not suffer from these sorts of problems and there were a few anti-war demonstrations, most particularly the massive global one before the attack on Iraq in 2003. But the U.S. ruling class learned part of the lesson of Vietnam, the end of conscription defused the immediate resistance of the young part of the population. And in reality there have been many more mercenaries, and proxy forces from other societies, used in both Iraq and Afghanistan than was the case in S.E. Asia.
The real reason for the rapidity of the collapse of the client State in Afghanistan lies elsewhere. President Joe Biden is the first President since Dwight Eisenhower to have a child who served in the military, and who in fact went into combat in Iraq two times. Having also lost 2 of his 3 children and a young wife, Biden is more keenly and personally aware of the impact of these events than any President in modern times (certainly far more than “Bone-Spur Don” who preceded him, and who also publicly proposed a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan). Biden was always the most skeptical voice in the Obama White House when it came to prosecuting the Middle East and Central Asian Wars. But more profound issues are at play.
Simply put the U.S. is now at the end of its time as the unquestioned “Global Hegemon”. This fact is not probably evident to the rank and file Taliban fighters, but it is known to
the relatively astute and worldly ranks of the Taliban leadership. The Vietnam War marked the shift from Strong Hegemony to Weak Hegemony for the U.S. role in the Capitalist hierarchy (See, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, Joshua Goldstein, New Haven, Yale U. Press, 1988). This has been somewhat similarly delineated as the occurrence of the “Signal Crisis of U.S. Capitalism and Hegemony” (See, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Giovanni Arrighi, New York, Verso; New and Updated Edition {February 16, 2010} ). Arrighi specifically meant that the “Signal Crisis“ for a hegemonic state marked the shift from an emphasis on productive / industrial capital to finance capital rule. Though he was certainly aware of the other connotations that “Signal Crisis” carried.
This looming end in Afghanistan marks the end of even Weak Hegemony in the Goldstein definition, and the “Terminal Crisis” for U.S. Global Hegemony in the terminology of Arrighi. For Arrighi, the “Terminal Crisis” mostly refers to the fact that the former hegemon can no longer enforce the economic conditions that made Financial manipulations by its ruling class the dominant economic feature of Global Capitalism. But he was well aware of the other meanings that attend to a phrase like the “Terminal Crisis”. The fact that a powerful country is no longer hegemonic does not mean it becomes totally powerless. But in the case of U.S., considering the rapid rise of the power of China, it means that the Chinese are gradually assuming the mantle of global leadership, that the U.S. carried in the period after WW 2. We could even argue that there has already been a period of co-Hegemony involving the U.S. and China that is ending, or perhaps that is just now beginning (just as the period between WW1 and WW2 can be viewed as a period of co-Hegmonship of the U.S. and Britain). The Taliban’s leaders live in a country that even has a short strip of border with China. They certainly realize that China will loom ever larger in their affairs while the U.S. will likely fade away.
I discussed some of these issues at greater length previously (including a short discussion of the significant contributions of Immauel Wallerstein and George Modelsky to the World Systems Theory view of global events), in “Long-Term Global Trends Affecting the U.S.: Analysis of Historical Global Developments and their Relevance to the Internal Situation of the United States”, Sep 28, 2020, dmorista, Leftist Politics, at < https://leftist---politics.blogspot.com/2020/09/historicalglobal-developments-and-their.html >, and in addition I posted some thoughts about the roles of the U.S. vs China, in “Comparisons of China and the U.S. in Their Roles as Global Hegemons”, Apr 3, 2021, dmorista, Leftist Politics, at < https://leftist---politics.blogspot.com/2021/04/comparisons-of-china-and-us-in-their.html >
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