The Legacy of Afghanistan

Since the triumph of World War II, the United States has waged two drawn-out, unsuccessful wars halfway around the world. Both were plagued by mission creep, ever-changing objectives, ill-fated and costly attempts at nation-building, a failure to understand the nature of the opponent and local culture, an erosion of domestic political support, and a depreciation of the sacrifices of servicemembers. The direct and indirect impacts on the American political system are still being felt. Four years after the last evacuation flight out of Kabul International Airport went wheels up, the long-term consequences of the most recent American defeat, in Afghanistan, remain uncertain. The trajectory, however, suggests that it could be just as damaging, if not more so, for the United States as the Vietnam misadventure a generation earlier.

But how does Afghanistan even compare to what happened in South Asia and on the American home front half a century ago? Vietnam’s pall was so significant it was difficult for any American to ignore. Perhaps it was the scale of the conflict and the staggering losses on the battlefield: 58,000 Americans who never returned. Or perhaps it was the draft, which touched most American families, including those who did not serve. And, of course, there was the protest movement that pitted Americans against each other, for or against, unwittingly casting the unfortunate whose draft numbers were called on the wrong side of the domestic debate. Maybe it was the humiliating collapse of the government in Saigon in April 1975, which came in the wake of the other national disgrace, Watergate.

For Americans whose memories of the Vietnam era are, at best, grainy, the social and cultural impact—and the competing narratives of those who supported or opposed the war—endured long after the conflict itself. A decade past the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia, the war continued to resonate, its trauma still fresh. Well into the 1980s—following Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now in the 1970s—Hollywood was still giving voice to the sacrifices of the era, serving up Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, and Hamburger Hill to a new generation. And then there was the soundtrack of the era: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Bob Dylan; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Marvin Gaye; and John Lennon. The catalogue is endless, but the melodies, though perhaps not their meaning, are still familiar in the 21st century.

The impact of Vietnam on American politics and U.S. foreign policy was no less significant. There were President Nixon’s “plumbers” deployed to staunch the leak of inside information (the Pentagon Papers) on the conduct of the war, setting the example and stage for the 1972 Watergate break-in and Nixon’s subsequent resignation. There was the question, until President Carter’s granting of unconditional amnesty on day one in office, of what to do with the several hundred thousand Americans who found a way to dodge the draft, thus avoiding the fate of tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen—a presidential action meant to heal the nation but which stung those who had served.

It was a full decade and a half after Saigon fell before a U.S. president, George H.W. Bush, on the heels of the U.S.-led victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991, felt confident enough to declare, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” The long American nightmare had finally ended, it seemed, and so the president threw a parade to celebrate. President Bush, of course, was only referring to the projection of U.S. power abroad. On the home front, kicking the “syndrome” proved much harder.

For Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr., Vice President Dan Quayle, and the current White House incumbent, the Vietnam War and service in it was a litmus test for some voters, who still felt the sting of long-past duty on the Vietnamese peninsula. Unsuccessful presidential candidates John McCain and John Kerry, each having served with distinction in the conflict, found that even they were not immune to the conflict’s reverberations across the years. Perhaps they just paid the price for backing President Clinton’s normalization of relations with Vietnam in 1995, which did not sit well with some veterans.

With the fourth anniversary of the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan now in the rearview, after 20 years and multiple deployments by over one million American servicemembers, diplomats, and civil servants, as well as allies from 50 nations, what will be recalled? Will there be monuments to the sacrifices, the costs, the patriotic service of the few, and the folly of it all? Will there be songs of protest or loss to which future generations will sing along, blissfully ignorant of their meaning? If the written word still possessed the power to move mountains, there would be many noteworthy accounts of the American sojourn in Afghanistan by journalists, servicemembers, diplomats, and others who were there; but, sadly, it does not.

Politically, while it is reasonable to read into the polarized U.S. domestic climate and struggling economy fallout from the drawn-out conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (“the forever wars”), the two were mere footnotes during the recent 2024 presidential campaign—not unlike the issue of Vietnam during the 1976 and 1980 campaigns. Despite the contributions of both Presidents Trump and Biden in bringing the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts to an end, or perhaps because of them, neither was a real factor in the presidential debate or its outcome. Looking out now over the political horizon, will future candidates in the U.S. be called to account for their service, or lack thereof, during “the Global War on Terrorism”? Seems unlikely. As if there were a 20-year hole in America’s collective memory.

Where the legacy of Afghanistan (and Iraq) seems likely to linger, even once the conflict itself can no longer be recollected, is in the public tension in America between engagement with and retrenchment from the international order that has largely kept the peace since WWII, bringing stability and prosperity to many. The embrace of tariffs by the Trump White House, despite economists’ concerns over their potential economic impacts, both at home and abroad, is just one reaction to what many Americans see as an over-investment in and over-reliance on the global system—a perceived dependency at odds with the country’s exceptionalism. U.S. withdrawal from or defunding of international conventions (e.g., the Paris Agreement) and organizations (e.g., UNHCR and WHO, for starters) is but another, as many in the U.S. see such entanglements as an encroachment not only on American sovereignty but also on the country’s values.

While the American electorate debates whether its national interests are best served by further integration with the prevailing global order or in isolation from it, traditional U.S. allies are left in suspense and scrambling as Russia, China, and more localized competitors assert themselves in the emerging global vacuum. If the U.S. continues on its current trajectory, this tension over membership and participation in the international community may prove the Afghanistan conflict’s most significant legacy, posing arguably the greatest challenge to date for the post-WWII world order. With potentially more profound implications for the U.S. and the state of the world in the coming decades than anything resulting from the calamity of Vietnam, personally, I would have preferred a new soundtrack.