US Evacuation from Kabul- servicemembers’ deaths NOT the fault of the Biden Administration
I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War. I grew up with it throughout the 1960s. I wondered in the early 1070s if I was going to get drafted. Then the US decided to get out of Vietnam and the war.
The US military pulled out of Vietnam in August of 1971 oand stopped supporting the South Vietnamese army. The US did supply equipment to the ARVN until 1973 after which as tanks, helicopters and other military equipment was destroyed or broken, the South Vietnamese army rapidly lost to the North Vietnamese army which was still being robustly supplied by the USSR and China.
By 1975, the south’s army was disintigrating and the north’s advancing on Saigon, the US decided to leave the country for good and began using the US Embassy as an embarkation point.
Helicopters began rotating from ships at seat to land on the roof of the embassy to evacuate US personnel. Hundreds of Vietnamese tried to get onto the helicopters as well, knowing they would face retribution at the hands of the northern government.
Two US marines died during the evacuation and two helicopter pilots died when their helicopter crashed at sea.
Frankly, there is NO good way to evacuate from a war zone. Retreats and evacuations always come with casualties.
Fast forward to Kabul, Afghanistan US airbase Sept 2021.
In February 2020, Trump Administration reached an agreement with the Taliban to remove American forces from Afghanistan. The deal negotiated by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo required that the United States and other NATO countries decrease their troop presence from around 14,000 to around 8,600 within 100 days and that they execute a complete withdrawal in just under 10 months. The deal also stipulated that some 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the United States would be released. The agreement was made without any consultation with the the Afghan government.
Thus undermined, the Afghan army literally melted from the field allowing Taliban fighters to sweep into Kabul more quickly than expected. Thousands of ally Afghanis tried to depart with the US troops.
In the course of the evacuation, a suicide bomber in the crowd detonated a device killing 13 US troops and sixty Afghanis. The soldier’s deaths are NOT the fault of the Biden administration’s decision to evacuate- it is the fault of the bomber. Absent advance intelligence, such bombings are usually successful.
It should also be noted that the bomber was NOT Taliban! The bomber was a member of an ISIS type organization and that the Taliban eventually found and killed the planner of the bombing in April 2023.
All those criticizing the Biden administration for the issue have yet to step up and say “Here is what we should have done differently.” There was no means to stop a suicide bomber from infiltrating the mass of civilians crowding the Abbey Gate that day.
As an aside, recall Trump telling the widow of a soldier killed in Africa “he knew what he signed up for.”
https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/1975_the_fall_of_saigon/Last-American-Casualties/
