How have the last days of the country’s second lost war been worse?

Well, I’ll admit it’s my impression, from watching and reading the news, that they are. In Saigon in 1975, U.S. aircraft ferried more than 7,000 Vietnamese, Americans and other foreign nationals to safety in 19 hours. Tens of thousands more were later rescued at sea. As of this writing, two days after the Taliban seized Kabul and the country, Afghans flown to safety number in the hundreds. But the main difference is that the evacuation from Saigon, though cobbled together on the fly, at least had some organization and planning. The one from Kabul appears not to have been planned at all; if it was, the execution has been dismal in the extreme.

One similarity between the two conflicts stands above others: The Great American Delusion machine operated as effectively in the Hindu Kush as it did in the Mekong Delta, producing rosy predictions of victory that were contradicted by the gloomy facts on the ground. No one in Washington imagined that 75,000 insurgents would defeat 300,000 Afghan soldiers, supported by heavy artillery and gunships, in a few weeks without expending much ammunition. The NVA had to fight their way into Saigon, the Taliban basically walked into Kabul.