The credibility of US deterrent put at risk by Biden's Afghan bug out

 Mackubin Owens:

The recent debacle in Afghanistan has elicited predictable comparisons with our exit from Vietnam in 1975. Although there are parallels, we should remember that historical analogies are often misleading. One such analogy is the claim that the United States was predestined to lose both conflicts. But this claim ignores the fact that victory or defeat depends on decisions actually made and strategies actually implemented.

Of course, all agree that the disastrous evacuation from Kabul recalls a similarly chaotic exit from Saigon. But there was a workable, and relatively well-executed plan in 1975, something that doesn’t appear to be the case in Kabul. As Jim Webb observed recently :

From the very outset, one searches in vain for evidence that our senior military and civilian planners came up with anything that indeed prepared for the worst while hoping for the best.

In contrast:

Once the North Vietnamese offensive began in March 1975 our military and civilian planners went into high gear. By the end of April when Saigon fell, refugee camps were already in place in Guam, the Philippines, Camp Pendleton, California, Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, and Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. American leaders gave clear signals to the advancing North Vietnamese that any interference with the retrograde would be met with military force. A full naval Task Force was off the coast, scooping up thousands of people . . . who had set out in small fishing boats without knowing whether they would live or die, and then brought to refugee camps that were ready to assist them. In a very short time, under the threat of an advancing army, our military rescued more than 140,000 Vietnamese, with hundreds of thousands of Boat People to follow over the next few years.

The decision to abandon the Bagram Air Base will go down in history as one of the great military blunders of all time.

But beyond the optics of a chaotic exodus from both Kabul and Saigon, the two conflicts diverge. To begin with, they were fought for different purposes. Despite after-the-fact claims to the contrary, our intervention in Vietnam had a strategic purpose based on an understanding of U.S. national interests. As David Halberstam wrote years ago in the context of the Cold War, Vietnam’s geographic position and cultural strengths made it “one of only five or six nations in the world that is truly vital to U.S. interests.”

The conflict in Afghanistan, on the other hand, began as a punitive reaction to the attacks of 9/11. The initial offensive involving cooperation with the Northern Alliance succeeded in routing the Taliban but after the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora, the United States lost its strategic focus and the mission expanded to an attempt to impose a new political regime on a country with no civic tradition in a region of little strategic importance to the United States.
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Biden and his supporters are trying to blame Donald Trump for the Afghan debacle, despite the fact that the latter had negotiated a conditions-based plan for extricating U.S. forces. But the fact is that Biden, following in the footsteps of the disgraceful action of Congress in 1975, chose unilaterally to abandon Afghanistan.

The Afghan debacle has led some to recycle the old narrative about Vietnam (For my own views, see this review of the Ken Burns PBS series on the conflict. ): that the Vietnamese Communists were too resolute, the South Vietnamese government too corrupt, and the Americans too clueless to fight the kind of war that would have secured victory. That Vietnam was destined to be a quagmire, and America was destined to lose there. But, again, countries are not predestined to win or lose wars. Victory or defeat depends on decisions actually made and strategies actually implemented.
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China is already putting forces on an island that will facilitate its attack on Taiwan.  Does Biden have any real credibility to deter that aggression?  And if he does at what cost?  I suspect there are other potential aggressors like Iran already preparing operations.  There is some evidence that Iran is acquiring some of the arms Biden left behind in Afghanistan.