Even After Saigon, Diplomats Forgot to Save the Game

Jay Ramesh

When you’re playing a video game, there’s often an option to save your progress at a checkpoint. This way, if you mess up the next level, you can just start over and try again, no problem. 

According to 2,000 pages of an Army investigative report released to the Washington Post, certain US diplomats think that they can do that while risking American and Afghan lives, repeating the same embarrassing mistakes that led to disaster during the 1975 Saigon evacuation. The only problem is that they forgot to save the game.

On August 26, 2021, a bomb exploded outside Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA), killing around 170 Afghan civilians and 13 US military personnel. Subsequently, the military launched an investigation into the conduct of the entire US withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the results were not pretty. According to Rear admiral Peter Vaseley, US diplomats and other government officials did not pay attention to any indicators of the military situation on the ground which caused them to be woefully unprepared for the US evacuation. 

The US ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson, had disagreed with military officials for months over the size of the US embassy staff in Kabul. Vasely wanted Wilson to shrink the embassy staff and prepare evacuation planes, but Wilson wanted to maintain a diplomatic presence in the country as it was falling apart. 

Wilson wanted two weeks to prepare for an evacuation, but the situation became so dire that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Wilson and told him to urgently draft evacuation plans. According to unnamed military officials, the ambassador didn’t understand the magnitude of the security threat in Afghanistan, as during this time ten government-controlled districts were falling to the Taliban every day. 

Certain Biden administration officials, whose names have been redacted from the report, feared that planning for an evacuation would raise alarms and accelerate the collapse of the central government in Afghanistan (similar to the reason given for the embarrassing US evacuation of Saigon in 1975). Because of this, the senior Marine officer in charge of planning the evacuation was not even allowed to discuss the possibility of an evacuation with anyone besides British officials, severely complicating the evacuation efforts. 

He believed that the US National Security Council (NSC) was not seriously planning for an evacuation at all, as they thought that an evacuation would “signal defeat”. Graham Martin, the last US ambassador to South Vietnam, gave the exact same reason for refusing to launch a full-scale evacuation of Saigon. Martin waited until North Vietnamese forces were just outside of Saigon to order an evacuation, ignoring all military reports that province after province were falling to the North Vietnamese Army.

So what’s the takeaway here?

Well, it’s clear that ambassadors haven’t learned anything since Saigon. One of the great things about this country is that the civilian government is in complete control of the military, thanks to our strong democratic institutions. However, when the interests and beliefs of the military and the civilian government clash, it’s one thing for our representatives to suggest politically feasible courses of action. It’s another to blatantly disregard military warnings and put thousands of lives at stake, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. 

The NSC was likely caught between a rock and a hard place: announcing an evacuation may have indeed accelerated the central government’s collapse, but not announcing one also led to chaos at HKIA and the failure to get many Afghan loyalists out of the country. However, Saigon showed us that we must heed military warnings and do away with the reactionary “anti-defeatist attitudes” that led to too-little, too-late evacuations in Saigon and later Kabul. 

Martin and Wilson both misjudged the situation and failed to heed military warnings, believing that the situation was under control from atop their ivory towers. The Biden administration must therefore make a concerted effort to ensure that ambassadors heed the warning of military officials and always have an evacuation plan. You don’t get to save the game in the real world.