More than a century ago, Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Sadly, those words still ring true. Many of today’s civilian and military leaders were alive when the last U.S. troops left South Vietnam, followed by  total collapse of that government and unification of North and South Vietnam under a one-party communist government. How many of them, as they sent our forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, remembered lessons learned in our misbegotten eight-year combat role in Vietnam?

Not enough would be my guess. In Vietnam, we poured billions into fighting a tough guerrilla foe and training our allies in the South to fight. In Afghanistan, we poured billions into fighting a tough guerrilla foe and training national forces to fight. In both cases, we failed miserably, leaving veterans of both wars (mine was Vietnam) asking what their fellow soldiers and marines died for.

That didn’t have to happen in this century. We had ample warning. In 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger presented a compelling doctrine to keep out of future Vietnams. One of its tenets: “U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives.” In other words, Weinberger told me in an interview when I worked for Business Week, there must be an “exit strategy.” How do we know we won? How and when do we get out when it becomes clear that we cannot achieve our goals?

Such hard-won caution was lost on the architects of the Afghan war that started as an assault on the Taliban, which harbored Al Qaeda after 9/11, and gradually morphed into nation-building. We went into Vietnam to fight communism, but our mission inexorably evolved into propping up a corrupt, unpopular government, much the same as in Afghanistan. It’s called “mission creep.”

To be sure, President Biden has presided over a chaotic, poorly planned rush to leave that should have started much earlier, but at least he’s the only one of the four presidents since the war started to say we’d get out and kept that promise. President Trump said we’d leave, but in typical fashion for him it was all talk.

Biden pulled the plug in good part because, as he told the New York Times editorial board in January 2020, U.S. officials were lying to the public about progress in Afghanistan. Optimism on the ground not justified by the facts flowed from leaders who couldn’t stomach the idea of yet another highly motivated guerrilla force frustrating the world’s most powerful military. The intelligence failure to note and/or acknowledge Taliban hegemony in rural areas as well as the speed of its recent advances echoed the George W. Bush administration’s tragically wrong claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 20 years ago.

“The strategy became self-validating,” a former Army counterinsurgency officer, retired Colonel Bob Crowley, was quoted as saying in the Washington Post. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.” Such positive spin helped keep our forces in Afghanistan far longer than the British did in the 19th century, and twice as long as the Soviets — with roughly the same results.

One question hanging over the quagmire that turned so quickly into defeat is whether the Afghan troops themselves are to blame. Amidst the flurry of commentary about their allegedly poor fighting spirit, columnist Thomas Friedman suggests, “It was never about the way our Afghan allies fought. It was always about their will to fight for the corrupt pro-American, pro-Western governments we helped stand up in Kabul.”

Now a recent Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center has more than six in 10 Americans saying that the Afghan war was never worth fighting. Tellingly, Republicans as well as Democrats share that view.

Just like the Viet Cong, the Taliban owned the night in many rural areas and demonstrated classic guerrilla patience. Many years ago, a retired Army officer interviewing a former North Vietnamese officer in Hanoi, said, “You know, we never lost a major battle.”

“That’s true,” said his old enemy. “But it’s also irrelevant.”

David Griffiths is a retired journalist was an Army artillery officer in West Germany and Vietnam. He lives in Mechanic Falls.

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