The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Kabul Made Saigon Look Like a Triumph

Major General James Livingston (USMC, retired) was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam in 1968. He’s got some credibility, in other words, when it comes to honor and sacrifice in the military for our great country. And he has nothing but condemnation for Joe Biden’s abject surrender of Afghanistan one year ago.

Forty-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.

He compares the America of both eras, as well as our commitment in the respective theaters of war. While there were just under 3,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, there were vastly more in Vietnam. The earlier war saw much more “widespread social unrest and a massive anti-war protest movement.”

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,” Livingston argues, “was a case study of how political micromanagement breeds operational ineptitude.” From dictating rescue missions to the movements of individual helicopters, our men and women on the front lines were handcuffed all the way back in DC.

He concludes:

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.”

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.