Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and Me

 

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 21^st 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 19^th 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.