Why did the exit from Vietnam differ so much as the retreat from Afghanistan.

[RED]

Honorable Exit by Thurston Clark explains it.

On page 7 of the prologue he says:

U.S. military personnel, government employees, and private citizens staged a spontaneous, uncoordinated, and clandestine mutiny against the policies and inaction of senior U.S. officials in Saigon and Washington

Bottom line, in Afghanistan, it was not just Bidens give a s__t attitude it was a failure of the boots on the ground to pick up and run with the ball.

It is a well written book and full of information most of us did not know.

[dogtag]

Both exits were chaotic.
The Vietnam exit was a mess partly because it was made under enemy fire.
The Afghanistan exit was made under Biden (enough said)

[togor]

Shortly after we left Vietnam their friend Red China became their enemy. They were nationalists more than communists.

Similarly the Taliban may not prove all that popular.

[lyman]

Shortly after we left Vietnam their friend Red China became their enemy. They were nationalists more than communists.

Similarly the Taliban may not prove all that popular.

Difference being China is another country, that shares a border (and was a source for supplies, )

Taliban is a religious entity, that is the gov't for that country, not a neighbor,


I have a feeling the non taliban afghan's will continue to do whatever they like, within reason,

and the Chinese will get more involved,

[dogtag]

Afghanistan with the Taliban might be more trouble to China than it's worth.

[dryheat]

Oh, in about 100 yrs. they'll be just like us.

[JB White]

Sounds as though you're putting a hex on them?

[togor]

Difference being China is another country, that shares a border (and was a source for supplies, )

Taliban is a religious entity, that is the gov't for that country, not a neighbor,


I have a feeling the non taliban afghan's will continue to do whatever they like, within reason,

and the Chinese will get more involved,

The Taliban are Pashto coming out of Pakistan. And one of the action items for the new government is to take land away from current residents and give it to the fighters as part of the spoils of war.

The VC and NVA were at least Vietnamese.

[lyman]

The Taliban are Pashto coming out of Pakistan. And one of the action items for the new government is to take land away from current residents and give it to the fighters as part of the spoils of war.

The VC and NVA were at least Vietnamese.

not quite

unless wiki is off, (not uncommon)

1994
Further information: Afghan Civil War (1992–1996) ? 1994
The Taliban are a movement of religious students (talib) from the Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan who were educated in traditional Islamic schools.[12] There were also Tajik and Uzbek students, demarking them from the more ethnic-centric mujahideen groups "which played a key role in the Taliban’s rapid growth and success."[131]

Education and motivation
In September 1994, Mullah Mohammad Omar and 50 students founded the group in his hometown of Kandahar.[12][132][133] Since 1992, Omar had been studying in the Sang-i-Hisar madrassa in Maiwand (northern Kandahar Province). He was unhappy because Islamic law had not been installed in Afghanistan after the ousting of communist rule, and now, he and his group pledged to rid Afghanistan of warlords and criminals.[12]

Within months, 15,000 students in Pakistan, mostly Afghan refugees who were studying in religious schools or madrasas (or as one source calls them Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-run madrasas[132]) joined the group.

In an effort to aid the anti-Soviet insurgency and inculcate a hatred of foreign invaders in Afghan children, the US government covertly distributed schoolbooks which promoted militant Islamic teachings and included images of weapons and soldiers. The Taliban used the American textbooks but they scratched out the images of human faces which were contained in them in keeping with their strict aniconistic and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. The United States Agency for International Development gave millions of dollars to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the 1980s and the university used the money to fund the writing and the publishing of the textbooks in local languages.[134]

The early Taliban were motivated by the suffering of the Afghan people, which they believed was being caused by the power struggles which were being waged by rival Afghan groups which were not adhering to the moral code of Islam; in their religious schools, they had been taught to believe that they should strictly adhere to Islamic law.[12][13][14]

Pakistani involvement
Sources state that Pakistan was heavily involved, already in October 1994, in the "creating" of the Taliban.[135][136] Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), strongly supporting the Taliban in 1994, hoped for a new ruling power in Afghanistan favourable to Pakistan.[12] Even if the Taliban received financial support from Pakistan in 1995 and 1996, and even if "Pakistani support was forthcoming from an early stage of the Taliban movement’s existence, the connection was fragile and statements from both the Pakistani ISI as well as the Taliban early on demonstrated the uneasy nature of the relationship. The ISI and Pakistan aimed to exert control, while the Taliban leadership manoeuvred between keeping its independence and sustaining support." The main supporters in Pakistan were General Naseerullah Babar, who mainly thought in terms of geopolitics (opening trade routes to Central Asia), and Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), as "the group represented Deobandism and aimed to counter the influence of the Jama’at-e Islami and growing Wahhabism."[137]