Antonio Navalón
When you visit Saigon or Ho Chi Minh – which is what it is called today in tribute to the first precursor of the Indochinese peninsula’s independence and later the Vietnam War winner against the Americans – one realizes that this site represents more than it appears. In this city, two visits are obligatory; the first is to go and see the remains of the bombing carried out in 1962 by the American Douglas A-1 Skyraider planes, which are located in the Museum of Military History of Vietnam in the city of Hanoi. The second visit is to go to what was once the United States Embassy in Saigon and witness the helicopter installed on the terrace trying to take off and flee in what until that moment had been the most shameful defeat in American history.
The Vietnam War was an ideological war. It was based on an error of appreciation and installed in the ignorance that the American people have felt about their role in the history of the modern world. The world will be forever indebted to the United States for ending the Nazis and fascists during World War II. It also owes the Americans to have limited the expansion of communist totalitarianism represented by Stalin’s Soviet Union and his plan to conquer the world, country by country. Although it is true that without events or elements such as the collaboration of Mao Tse Tung, after Josip Broz Tito; the rupture of the Fifth International; and the end of the monopoly of communist thought, the United States could never have won that battle.
Today, forty-six years after the shameful night in Saigon, Americans once again witness irreplaceable shame. The fall of Afghanistan and the entry into Kabul of the Taliban is the biggest defeat since the founding of the country of the flag of the bar and the stars, and it is for two reasons. The first is because they were fighting for an ideological reason in Saigon, not for a threat or reaction to a provoked aggression. However, this being the second reason, in Afghanistan – as they themselves called it – the Americans were fighting for the beginning of a program called “Enduring Freedom” that for many years won the support of the whole world and that had the objective of avenging the humiliation and the cold-blooded murder of more than three thousand Americans in the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1990 and with financial support from the Saudi Arabian government, the Taliban emerged in the Tora Bora Mountains. At the time, the Taliban were a kind of outpost for other movements such as the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, the latter being responsible for breaking with the untouchability of the United States.
At the time when the invasion against Afghanistan was decreed, and the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, not only was it revenge or a response to what had been the largest attack in American history but, above all things, it was a search for a new way to articulate a military and political reaction against those who dared and managed to defeat in a first and surprising battle through the attack of the Twin Towers.
Afghanistan is much more than Iraq, Kuwait, or any other of America’s lost wars. In none of those battles was there a reason to respond to an aggression as successful as the attack on September 11, 2001. But, above all, this attack was the demonstration that radical Islamism – that which forces women to marry at the age of eleven, which forces them to wear burqas, the one that prohibits women from receiving an education and denies the majority of the population their human condition – was able to form a government based on the most extreme part of the Koranic application of the Law.
Joe Biden is a victim of the politics followed by him too – since he has been part of The Establishment for more than thirty years – and of all the errors accumulated in American politics, but especially in his country’s activities and military work. It is complicated to pretend to be the absolute leader when it is a country that is ambitious, that has nuclear weapons capable of destroying the world, but it is not known if it has the necessary ideas to build it, especially also because since 1953 with the establishment of the 38th Parallel between the two Koreas – and except for the Grenada Island War in 1983 and the 1989 invasion of Panama – The United States has not been able to win any war.
Regarding what happened, there is no specific culprit. The Taliban in the Presidential Palace in Kabul, next to an Embassy that cost a billion dollars to build, is the biggest failure since – unlike the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Koreans, or any other-, Afghans along with some Saudis, had the audacity to attack successfully, to challenge and bring the United States of America to its knees. Neither Secretary Blinken nor President Biden can be blamed. What can be done and more with all the resources available from the Pentagon is to analyze what has happened.
Operation Desert Storm is a long way off. Iraq was a demonstration that air dominance is insufficient for the consolidation of a conquest. So are the theories of the former Secretary of State with George Bush, Colin Powell, that aerial preeminence was enough to win battles, since it was shown that without infantry, there could be no victory. And now, after trillions of dollars invested, of thousands of lives lost, of the hundreds of thousands of Americans with post-traumatic stress syndrome circulating and being a danger on the streets and highways of their country, the United States faces a difficult image to erase. Seeing the Taliban again, the same ones who destroy temples but above all those who deny women the status of being people, occupy palaces and cities, is a reminder and at the same time an implicit explanation that they lost the battle.
The chain reaction that can be triggered from here is unpredictable. From the tunnels and caves of Tora Bora to the destruction of the Twin Towers, there is a long road in which the most important thing is the inability of the United States to understand that hatred and, above all, the policy that they implemented with the mujahideen and the fighters against the Soviet occupation would end up turning against them. It should not be forgotten that it was the United States that armed the Taliban Afghan army. They gave them the missiles to shoot down the Soviet helicopters that were massacring the Afghan people. And in the struggle – as happened in Vietnam to end the communist danger- they inadvertently armed the dangerous army that years later would manage to bring down the World Trade Center. Now – twenty years after so much pain, so many tears, innocent victims, and after so much frustration – they have made the army of the Taliban and Afghans formed with a kind of supermen incapable of being defeated. First, the English failed and succumbed, then the Soviets, and finally, the Americans’ turn came. I have to say that the world will be different from today.
The ghosts of Korea, Vietnam, the Twin Towers, and military defeat haunt and veil the United States. In addition, the taste that prevails in the United States is bitter, and the situation occurs in a very cruel wink of history, being less than twenty days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is celebrated, which was a true turning point of the history of the world.
Since the night of the attack on the Twin Towers, every year, I shed my tears for the lost world. I know the world was different from the moment the plane hit the first tower. However, today my tears come together and grow larger because the consequence of that – far from having been defeated and avenged – has been enhanced. The scene in the Presidential Palace in Kabul leaves the death of Osama bin Laden with a lesser meaning. It puts the Western world at the feet of an Islamic power that has already proven capable of defeating the greatest military force on the planet.
But beyond the inventory of tears and what could be and was not, there are objective data that have a name and surname and are surprising because of the clumsiness with which they were handled. All this could have happened two months before or two months later and prevented it from coinciding with the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, the greatest defeat for the United States. Nothing is the same, and nothing will be the same. However, it is impossible to stop remembering that the other time the United States was hit in its imperial territory, the war ended victoriously. And it did it forcefully and definitively, dropping the first two atomic bombs against its attacker in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of all the wars, the worst are the religious ones, and the West is beginning to understand that it has just lost the war against the most radical Islamism.
