Kabul Made Saigon Look Like a Triumph

F orty-seven years ago, I stood inside an American compound in Saigon, watching in anger and frustration as the country disintegrated. I can vividly remember Army officers handing me the dispatch that we all dreaded. It was the execute order (EXORD) for Operation Frequent Wind: the final evacuation of Americans and at-risk Vietnamese allies from the invading communist regime. As a Marine major with two combat tours, I was designated as the “action officer” for the operation.

To watch Kabul fall, some half a century later, resurrected old pains and revealed old scars. It was, in many ways, a far more tragic story than what I witnessed off the jade coasts of Vietnam.

Consider the dynamics of both wars. Less than 0.25 percent of the U.S. military was assigned to Afghanistan when President Biden ordered their total withdrawal last year. It was little under 3,000 troops, just enough with NATO and contractor support to empower the Afghan military to do the actual fighting. Our combat casualties were low by historical standards and paled to the ghastly losses we experienced in Vietnam. While the 1960s were marked by widespread social unrest and a massive anti-war protest movement, Afghanistan in 2020 barely registered on issue surveys conducted by pollsters.

While there were stark differences between the two evacuations, Kabul made Saigon look like a triumph. Proper preparation and planning were accomplished prior to South Vietnam’s collapse. A Marine regiment was already in theater, the Air Force had begun a large airlift of “at-risk” Vietnamese allies in the months and weeks prior, and the Navy had an Amphibious Ready Group on station and ready for the evacuation order. Despite the heavy enemy fire and a North Vietnamese Army at the gates, Frequent Wind was completed in just over 24 hours. Almost 700 helicopter sorties evacuated over 7,000 Vietnamese and Americans at a loss of four Marines.

We had the tools to do the job and the support without interference from the civilian leadership in Washington. There, no artificial restraints were placed on us by civilian authorities. Commanders understood the simple presidential intent — get people out — and we were free to use all available assets.

Afghanistan saw little of this planning partly due to President Biden’s mistrust of military leaders and his reluctance to properly commit the necessary troops to conduct the evacuation. This led to the surrender of a vital airfield at Bagram, despite clear evidence that there were Taliban closing in along multiple axes. If any, little preparation or staging was done to prepare for the humanitarian catastrophe that predictably emerged. Even in the face of rapid enemy conquests and the collapse of multiple Afghan field armies, the president refused to soften his restrictions on reinforcing troops. It was only when the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul that more forces were authorized, a desperate move to secure the final lifeline out of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was a case study of how political micromanagement breeds operational ineptitude. It was so absurd that officials in the White House and E-Ring of the Pentagon, 7,000 miles away, were restricting individual helicopter movements, placing unconscionable limitations on rescue missions outside the airport gates, and requiring National Command Authority level approval for special forces operations to extract stranded American citizens. Micromanagement is cancer to military tasking, and in Kabul, it culminated in the loss of 13 Marines at the airport’s Abbey Gate. Further, many Americans were left behind, despite repeated assurances from the Biden administration that all U.S. citizens would be rescued.

PHOTOS: Afghanistan Evacuation

Winston Churchill was correct when he said of Dunkirk that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.” In that spirit, Saigon was an example of operational success amid strategic defeat. No such claim can be made of the Kabul fiasco.

And few understand how close this ineptitude came to a full-scale military disaster. Had the Taliban not agreed to a last-minute cease-fire brokered by American officials, Kabul may well have fallen into a murderous rampage. Even with that cease-fire in hand, when we requested more time to complete our evacuation, a peasant army of hardscrabble religious zealots told the most powerful nation on earth “no.”

It was a humiliation that shattered more than trust in the president, whose poll numbers collapsed along with Kabul. It was a blow to the credibility of America itself. Not just in those we betrayed, from the innocent Afghan girls who can no longer go to school to the soldiers who risked everything to fight with us, but to our military that once prided itself on “leaving no man behind.”