“This is manifestly not Saigon,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken protested as US citizens hunkered down in the old NATO airport and the Taliban rolled into the adjoining, unguarded civilian terminal.
Even when the US flag was lowered on the embassy and barefoot Taliban fighters wandered the halls of Kabul’s presidential palace, posing for photos behind the desk of Afghanistan’s runaway President Ashraf Ghani, senior US and Australian officials maintained that line.
“Who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?” they seemed to be asking.
Maybe the images the world is now seeing don’t represent a repeat of the west’s ignoble retreat from Vietnam so much as they do a “Saigon on steroids”, as one US human rights lawyer who has worked in Afghanistan for years said on Sunday.
Then, as now, desperate millions who placed their faith and trust in Western allied forces, have been left to their fate. Then, as now, those left behind are fighting to board evacuation flights and scaling the backs of air bridges.
Just weeks ago the formidable and sprawling US compound in the heart of Kabul was touted as a potential new safe haven for vulnerable foreign missions, including Australia, which was the first to close its embassy in May.
Now even the Americans are holed up at the airport, reduced to appealing for safe passage for their own citizens and a lucky few Afghans from their Taliban enemies who are now leisurely inspecting the rich spoils of victory.
That includes billions of dollars of US-funded state-of-the-art weaponry that should come in handy in the inevitable civil war to follow when the anti-Taliban resistance takes shape.
The Biden administration insists its inability to anticipate the speed with which the Taliban took the country in the past week was not an intelligence failure.
Its latest forecast last Thursday had the Afghan capital falling to the Islamic insurgents in three months, a window that would have been comfortably outside the September 11 deadline for the total withdrawal of US forces.
In the end it took three days.
US officials appear to have been so focused on their withdrawal timeline they missed the uncomfortable ground reality that the Taliban was the best prepared. Both the Afghan and US administrations seemed completely unprepared for the blitzkrieg of the past week in which the country’s provincial capitals fell like dominoes – many without resistance.
“It is stunning and quite shocking to see some of the enormous weapons caches the Taliban have now taken and that were apparently available, and to recall conversations with government officials at the frontline who said they recruited soldiers but had no weapons to give them and felt utterly abandoned,” veteran Afghan analyst Martine Van Bijlert wrote for the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
Former BBC Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary, whose frequent dispatches from Kabul have been compulsory reading, says the Taliban’s “back door” negotiations for the takeover of some cities “seem to have been the work of months if not years”.
Meanwhile, thousands of Afghan National Security Forces soldiers had not been paid for months. There were reports many were even going hungry. There was no central co-ordination and no backup for those troops who were not already too demoralised to fight.
That is on the now-collapsed Afghan government. It must take the blame for the speed with which the country has fallen to an enemy determined to reinstate a brutal Islamic theocracy.
But it was the Trump administration’s Faustian bargain with the Taliban to end all attacks on US troops in exchange for a total withdrawal, and Biden’s decision to set a date for that exit without imposing any preconditions, that was the morale booster the Taliban needed to steamroll any hopes of a power-sharing agreement with the government.
As the US races for the exit, its strategic rivals are moving in.
Russia has made a point of declaring it will not be evacuating its embassy.
China’s bellicose mouthpiece the Global Times, meanwhile, gloats that Washington has “left Afghanistan in tatters” and is an “unreliable partner”. “Totally unlike the US, China has a friendly image in Afghanistan,” it noted.
America has created a vacuum in Afghanistan. It will not get to decide who fills it.
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As smoke billowed from document furnaces inside the US embassy in Kabul, and choppers ferried evacuating embassy staff to the nearby military airport, the Biden administration insisted the Taliban’s weekend capture of the Afghan capital was not a repeat of the 1975 fall of Vietnam.