Will Afghanistan Be America's Second Vietnam—Or Something Worse?

At a press conference on 8 July, U.S. President Joe Biden unequivocally refuted the suggestion that there was any comparison between America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and its humiliating retreat from Vietnam in 1975. He asserted that the Afghan military was far better equipped and far more capable of withstanding an imminent Taliban takeover of the country than Saigon’s forces were in confronting the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong armies almost half a century ago.

Biden stated that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that ‘there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country’. He declared that the U.S. went into Afghanistan ‘to degrade the terrorist threat to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks could be continued against the United States. We achieved those objectives … We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build.’

According to reliable estimates, the Taliban control more than half of the country’s districts, many of them captured after the beginning of the American withdrawal on 1 May. These include parts of Badakshan province in the northeast bordering on Tajikistan and portions of Herat province in the west bordering on Iran that had not been Taliban strongholds and have large non-Pashtun populations that are averse to Taliban rule. Several of these ethnic groups have organised their own militias in order to bolster the government’s capacity to resist Taliban advances.

However, with Afghan forces melting away before Taliban advances they haven’t been able to stop Taliban control of large swathes of the countryside. The Taliban conquest of a large segment of Herat province and their control over several crossing points into Iran have forced Tehran, which has been firmly opposed to the Taliban coming to power in Kabul, to start negotiations with the Taliban. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met with a Taliban delegation that had been invited to Iran in the first week of July to urge the Taliban to come to a negotiated settlement with the Kabul regime to forestall ‘unfavourable’ consequences for Afghanistan.

With the American withdrawal nearing completion, the Taliban have increased their military pressure, hoping to win an outright victory, though they will probably be willing to settle for a major share in a coalition government as a stepping stone for the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The latter outcome appears a distinct possibility, especially given the fact that the U.S. didn’t make a political settlement between Kabul and the Taliban a precondition for its withdrawal.

The Trump administration was interested only in bringing American soldiers home without incurring major losses, in the process leaving the Afghan government to its fate. The Biden administration has followed in its predecessor’s footsteps and taken that strategy to its conclusion. This may not be an exact replication of the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, but the final outcome is unlikely to be very different.

The U.S. made the fatal error of turning its anti-terrorist campaign into an anti-insurgency one in 2001–02 and getting embroiled in an unwinnable civil war. History teaches us that prolonged foreign intervention in intra-state conflict exacerbates the conflict by stoking nationalist and religious sentiments. Propping up regimes, especially one as dysfunctional as the Afghan regime, normally leads to severe a backlash, as both the South Vietnam and Afghanistan cases demonstrate.

Washington’s allies and adversaries will see the U.S.’s abandonment of Afghanistan—no matter how much it is camouflaged in optimistic verbiage—as a defeat similar to the one it suffered in Vietnam. The major difference between the two outcomes is that while there was a clear-cut alternative power structure present in Vietnam that could replace the American-backed government, that’s not true of Afghanistan.

The Taliban is clearly the major contender for power in the post-American era, but, given the fractious nature of Afghan society, its control over the whole country will be contested by force of arms by various regional factions, warlords and ethnic groups. This means that Afghanistan could slide into chaos as it did in the early 1990s after the Russian withdrawal, thus once again creating the space for non-state actors, including terrorist groups, to move in.

As if that wouldn’t be bad enough, neighbours—Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and India – whose interests and objectives are often in conflict with each other, surround Afghanistan. An unstable, indeed failing or failed, state is bound to draw them into the vortex of civil conflict, making the situation in Afghanistan even worse. There’s much more at stake here than merely the credibility of the U.S. and its loss of face.

Mohammed Ayoob is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).