The distressing scenes at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul have been compared to the chaotic US evacuation of Saigon in 1975. However, the comparison ends with the photos and video footage.
In reality, the US evacuation of Saigon saved thousands of Vietnamese who were able to come to the US and were resettled.
The US at that time was taking in refugees. But today in Washington, there is no interest in refugees, and US officials in Kabul fled quickly without staying to the end to manage the evacuation and help the locals to flee.
Graham Martin was America’s last ambassador in Saigon. According to one obituary, “Martin, a native of North Carolina who had lived in Winston-Salem since 1976, died Tuesday at Forsyth Memorial Hospital. In April 1975, Martin, as the ambassador to South Vietnam, coordinated the helicopter airlift from the embassy compound in Saigon that ferried the remaining Americans and 140,000 Vietnamese to the 7th Fleet in the South China Sea while the city fell to the invading North Vietnamese.”
According to another official explanation of his role, “Although military involvement in Vietnam had come to an end, the US still had to evacuate all of the Americans who remained. It was the biggest helicopter rescue of its kind in history – an 18-hour operation that carried more than 1,000 Americans and well over 5,000 Vietnamese to safety.”
While some countries have agreed to take Afghan colleagues, the US doesn’t appear to initially be prioritizing them.
France has said it will evacuate French nationals and Afghan colleagues this week. Australia is sending troops to evacuate local staff and Australians. Canada has said it will take 20,000 Afghan refugees.
The US should be taking in Afghan refugees as well, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American novelist, wrote on Twitter. The US took in 130,000 Vietnamese refugees in 1975, he said.
Scenes at Kabul’s airport are chaotic, and the US presence there doesn’t seem to be helping organize any refugee airlifts or even let any locals on to planes.
In contrast to Vietnam, where the US envoy Martin stayed until the last moment at the embassy and then got the US fleet off the coast to help rescue Vietnamese, US diplomats in Kabul appear to have left quickly, leaving behind troops and locals they worked with.
TODAY’S AMERICAN diplomats are not like Martin; they don’t come with his background and sense of duty and willingness to stand with the local people. There is no US leadership today speaking about aiding Afghan refugees or doing an airlift, or even managing the chaos unfolding at Kabul’s airport.
It is similar to the US role in Eastern Syria, where the US abandoned colleagues they were working with, such as Hevrin Khalaf, a female political leader, who was then murdered by Turkish-backed jihadists. The most the US did was sanction the Turkish-backed group that murdered her a year and a half later. In Eastern Syria, the US hasn’t even bothered to help arrange vaccinations for local partner forces.
It’s a different mindset than in the 1970s. In the past, the US had refugee policies that embraced people who were fleeing Saigon and also those fleeing from Cuba and some other regimes. There doesn’t seem to be a version of the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which enabled approximately 130,000 refugees from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to enter the US.
The US has had ample time to aid the Afghans, not only over the last 20 years, but also since the autumn of 2019 when the US knew it was leaving. The Trump administration pushed the deal that would enable the US to leave, drawing down troops in 2020 and then leaving in 2021.
This was known. Yet, when the US decided to leave places such as Bagram Air Base, it did so in the middle of the night without even telling local commanders.
No procedure was put in place to process large-scale Afghan requests for asylum or refugee status. Despite the US having much better technology these days to deal with such requests, almost nothing was done, and the chaos at Kabul’s airport is the result.
Other NATO countries that had soldiers in Afghanistan and long involvement also appear to have been taken by surprise by the chaos. It is chaos in a world order that they now appear to be used to, unable to coordinate the kind of basic refugee doctrines they used to once have, such as when 170,000 Hungarians fled in 1956 to Austria after the Soviet invasion.
It is these differences that make Kabul in 2021 appear very different than Saigon in 1975. Already some Afghans have been shot at the airport. They have lost their lives in part because powerful, privileged, wealthy, Western countries that played a role in Afghanistan for 20 years couldn’t bother to arrange a proper and coordinated response to the collapse of the government there and to offer assistance to people who had worked with foreigners who served in Afghanistan.
Refugee policies 100 years ago appear to have been better coordinated than what has unfolded these days in Kabul.