BY DAVID A. SUPER
(LA Times) The rapid collapse of the Afghan government has lessons to teach us, if we will listen. Many of these are lessons we could have learned from the Vietnam War, but we did not.
In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the enemy was very real. The Viet Minh began as a nationalist response to the abuses of French colonial rule but upon taking power in the north showed themselves fully committed to the totalitarian ideology that killed and imprisoned tens of millions of people. Their close allies, the Khmer Rouge, perpetrated one of the most staggering genocides since World War II. Their ascendancy sent untold numbers to brutal “reeducation camps,” where many died.
The Taliban, similarly, began as a reformist reaction to the endemic corruption and civil strife that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. This promise won them widespread support against the country’s unloved warlords. But once in power, they turned out to be just as heedless of human life as their predecessors, imposing a maniacal, distorted version of Islamic law, stripping women and girls of their basic civil rights, and oppressing adherents of other strains of Islam. They also provided a safe haven to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, tens of millions of innocent people were subjugated to brutal regimes they had no plausible chance to remove. The case for humanitarian intervention was compelling.