Watching the shocking entrance of the Taliban into
Kabul today, as Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country and chaos reigned
in the city, takes me vividly back to April 30, 1975, the day that Saigon fell to
the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong. Then too we witnessed chaotic scenes—encapsulated
in the image of U.S. Embassy personal contractors
and desperate Vietnamese allies climbing a perilous ladder onto the roof and
then scrambling onto helicopters for the flight out.
I must acknowledge that I—then a 25-year-old self-described radical who had been involved in anti-Vietnam protests for ten years---cried tears of joy as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin that day; elated by the military victory of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese army which had fought with tremendous steadfastness and courage for over a decade against the world’s strongest military power to liberate their country. Looking back, I have ambivalent feelings about my ecstatic response to the humiliation of my own country, which was reeling in the realization that it had lost a war for the first time in its history. (Afghanistan is clearly the second). In fact, I still believe, as I did then, that the U.S. war effort in Vietnam was immoral and destructive of both that country and our own. Yet a lot went down in the ensuing months and years that nowadays causes me to recoil whenever I look back on my ‘tears of joy’ moment.
First, I was shaken when reading accounts of the crackdown on free expression
by the ‘liberators’ of Vietnam, who dispatched hundreds of thousands of their
fellow countrymen sent to ‘re-education’ camps. Still, I noted that the U.S.-backed
South Vietnamese regime had also been dictatorial—and deeply corrupt to boot. Then came the horror of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, a grotesque outbreak
of murderous savagery which, like the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s
and Stalin’s massive purges in the 1930s, showed vividly that absolute power,
even when clad in Marxian garb, indeed corrupts absolutely. I shudder that I had once lionized brutal killers.
During the 1980’s. I made four trips to the Soviet Union
as a journalist to visit with and report on Jewish refuseniks persecuted for
speaking out against an anti-Semitic regime that denied them the right
to emigrate. During the first decade of the 21st Century, while
working as an advocate for strengthening Muslim-Jewish relations, I came to belatedly
understand that America, a multi-racial and multi-religious country where immigrants
from anywhere have the opportunity to feel become fully American and realize the
American dream; operates a model intrinsically superior to that of Europe, where
it is infinitely more difficult for immigrants, including Muslims, Black Africans
and Asians, to achieve full acceptance simply because they aren’t
ethnically French, Italian, German or Swedish.
Having buttressed myself in a newfound appreciation for
America and its founding vision, I was horrified by the rise of Trump and white
ethno-nationalism. Yet the emergence and still-extant peril of American fascism
led me to the determination to fight to preserve America’s promise, rather than
reverting to my youthful anti-Americanism. Nowadays, I affirm that America, warts
and all, is a force for good in the world, an indispensable player in the
struggle to averting a grim, authoritarian future for humanity,
So today, I am decidedly not crying tears of joy over
the fall of Kabul. On the contrary, I am repulsed by the triumph of the Taliban
and their sinister ideology, and fearful that Afghanistan will now revert to a
deranged medievalist vision of an Islamic emirate with women reduced to the
level of chattel; light years from the liberating version of Islam that I have
absorbed from many Muslim friends with whom I have worked. Tragically, it now
appears the retrograde jihadi vision will be energized around the world by its victory
in Afghanistan; just as happened with the rise of ISIS in 2014. I fear for the
fates of westernized Afghans of both sexes who believed they could build a progressive
and humanistic Afghanistan, America nurtured these beautiful souls and then abruptly
abandoned them to their fates.
Still, it is unlikely that things would have ended any
differently if the U.S. had postponed its withdrawal one year or five years, Despite
the myriad differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan and between the
ideologies of communism and jihadism, the falls of Saigon and Kabul 46 years
apart vividly show the folly of the US seeking to impose our will through puppet
regimes in countries hostile to our values and determined to achieve
self-determination. As one observer noted today, the Taliban fighters fought out
of deep and abiding belief, while the Afghan army recruits fought for money. In
both Vietnam and Afghanistan, a huge part of that belief was about driving out foreign—i.e.
American—invaders, just as the rag tag Afghans also improbably accomplished against
the British in the 19th Century and the Soviets in the 1980’s.
On the other hand, all may not be lost in Afghanistan.
It is hard to see how a Taliban-run Afghanistan can survive outside the international
system. All of Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Pakistan, India, Russia,
China and even Iran, look with trepidation at the emergence of a proselytizing
jihadist regime near their borders. The empowerment of a generation of Afghan
women is an established fact that will be hard to turn back completely.
History shows us that over time revolutionary fervor
fades and once-radicalized nations join the international system, as Vietnam
did in the 1980’s and 1990’s. My own evolution, like so many of my contemporaries,
from an anti-American radical to a liberal who believes in harnessing American
power to achieve a democratic world order, is a piece of that same process. There
will continue to be major bumps and setbacks along the way, but I continue to
believe with Martin Luther King that the arc of history ultimately bends toward
justice. While mourning today’s tragic events in Afghanistan, all of us must recommit
to buttressing freedom, building a more just societal order and to saving our shared
planet.
