“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army, they’re not. There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” 

These were the words of US President Joe Biden back in June when pressed by reporters whether parallels could be drawn between the situation materialising on the ground in Afghanistan with what unfolded in Saigon in 1975 when, having regained control of the Vietnamese capital, the Communists would go on to consolidate their grip over the country in the coming months, ending a twenty-decade war. 

President Biden, of course, was referring to a popularised photograph displaying evacuees being airlifted by a helicopter from the roof of a building after the unconditional surrender of Saigon. 

The image has come to represent the failure of the US’ Asia policy at the time. But despite President Biden’s assertions and US intelligence assessments suggesting the Taliban could take as many as three months to reclaim Kabul and Afghanistan, the insurgent outfit has blitzed through Afghan territory, capturing provincial capital after capital, until Kabul itself finally fell on Sunday.

Amid mounting fears that Kabul was going to be breached within days and not months, the US dispatched an emergency deployment of 3,000 troops in what amounted to a last-ditch attempt to evacuate its embassy staff, soldiers and citizens. 

It was, perhaps, inevitable then that the catastrophic two-decade-long ‘war on terror’ campaign has been likened to the US occupation of Vietnam that began in 1954 and reached a conclusion in 1975 that marked the end of 120 years of foreign occupation in the Asian nation. 

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, the first-ever televised war, claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans and 2,50,000 Vietnamese and ended with the US being ousted from the country. 

It kicked off in 1954, following the defeat of French colonial troops by North Vietnamese forces led by General Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu. 

The next 21 years were characterised by a bloody and brutal conflict, the visuals of which were broadcast across TV screens in the US. At its peak, the US was, reported, to have mobilised some 5 lakh soldiers in Vietnam, nearly five times its highest presence in Afghanistan (in 2010). 

But on April 30, 1975, the Communist-ruled the North Liberation Front captured Saigon, the capital of the US-backed South Vietnam, roughly two years after the Western nation had withdrawn its military presence in the country. 

The capture of Saigon signalled the end of the Vietnam War. Soon after, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that the US would overhaul its Asia policy. 

Similarly, the US has invested tens of billions of dollars into the Afghan defence sector, leaving many to ponder how a nation-building effort that spanned two decades could be dismantled in the span of just eight weeks. 

On Sunday, the Taliban entered the presidential palace after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, with a Taliban political bureau spokesman proclaiming soon after that the ‘war is over.’ 

The process to establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has now begun even while US troops continue to depart the country