Afghanistan strategy condemned to repeat history

More than 40 years ago I was a doctoral student in the department of communication studies at the University of Iowa, studying political rhetoric. I wrote a dissertation in 1978 about President Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin crisis in August, 1964. Specifically, my research focused on Johnson’s initial justification for intervening in Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong and his subsequent failed rhetoric explaining the need to remain.

Sadly, history appears to be repeating itself in August, 2021. What happened in Kabul last Sunday was tragic and hard to watch, as was the quicker than predicted takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban following the United States decision to leave. Admittedly, President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was a tough one to make.

Not surprisingly, there has been strong criticism by military and intelligence experts, as well as in the media, in the last few days about the Biden administration’s failure to implement a coherent and thoughtful plan for the safe evacuation of Americans and Afghanistan citizens who supported us. The media criticism continued following Biden’s speech Monday, making clear the president failed to address directly and take responsibility for the tactical failure of the plan to leave so quickly.

Nevertheless, it could be argued that, regardless of the existence of contingency plans, there may have been no way our exit would be anything other than chaotic, leading to pandemonium. That is something we learned the hard way during the fall of Saigon in April of 1975 — a horrifying image which immediately comes to mind as we now watch what is happening at the Kabul airport.

The exit strategy notwithstanding, President Biden’s decision, I submit, was necessary and inevitable. The problem is not just the lack of a sound plan to leave. It is that the United States never learned the right lesson from the Vietnam War: that you cannot successfully export democracy to a country where there isn't a will by the people in the host nation to fight for one.

Just as was the case during the Vietnam War, for the last few years the United States policy in Afghanistan was framed by what in my research over four decades ago I labeled the "irresistible rhetoric of redemption." This was an argument continuously and illogically made: It is necessary to provide more resources (money and lives), so the argument goes, to protect what we already have invested and the losses already incurred.

This is a move destined to fail precisely because it has no end point and cannot undo the mistake originally made. How sad it is, therefore, that once again the United States did not heed the advice George Santayana and then Winston Churchill wisely offered: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Richardt Cherwitz is a professor emeritus in the Moody College of Communication and founder of the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin. He grew up in Davenport and is a graduate of the University of Iowa.