I’ve been thinking about that image and that chapter in our history quite a bit since President Donald Trump announced a “peace” deal with the Taliban in February 2020 and President Joe Biden unveiled his pullout plan in April 2021—but especially this month, amidst footage and reports of Afghan government officials clambering onto a plane in hopes of escaping the Taliban takeover of Badakhshan province.

History may not repeat itself, as Mark Twain is credited with saying, but it does indeed rhyme sometimes. Sadly, the American people and their leaders are not interested in the rhymes or lessons of history.

Costs

Given that more than 60 percent of the public supports withdrawing from Afghanistan, President Biden is—and President Trump was—undeniably in step with the American people. Yet leadership—especially on matters of national security—often requires more than reflecting the national mood. There are times when a president needs to explain to the American people why they should follow a path they’d rather not take. Consider Thomas Jefferson waging a war on piracy half-a-world away; Abraham Lincoln transforming the Civil War from a struggle to preserve the Union into a struggle to abolish slavery; Franklin D. Roosevelt dragging an isolationist America back onto the world stage; Harry Truman arguing for open-ended engagement and global containment of Moscow; Ronald Reagan reviving the nation’s commitment to what Truman began; George H.W. Bush building support for liberating Kuwait; Bill Clinton wading into the Balkans; George W. Bush ordering the surge in Iraq.

There were costs to confronting those national security challenges, but the presidents who confronted those challenges reckoned that the costs of pulling back or turning away would be far greater than the costs of engagement—and then set about the task of making that case to the American people.

Without question, engagement carries heavy costs. The Cold War cost Americans 104,000 military personnel and $6 trillion. The war on terrorism has claimed some 7,000 US personnel and devoured more than $2 trillion in treasure. Since 9/11, there have been 2,312 US troops killed and more than 20,500 wounded supporting operations in Afghanistan (though a recent Wall Street Journalanalysis bears repeating in this regard: there hasn’t been an American military fatality in Afghanistan since February 2020). President Biden, President Trump, and other well-meaning observers look upon these numbers and conclude that the costs are just too high—the costs of Afghanistan’s relative stability, the costs of America’s security, the costs of international order, the costs of engagement.

“I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan,” President Biden soberly declared in April. “I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.” America’s military has carried out his pullout plan with dispatch and will complete the withdrawal ahead of schedule. “We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives,” he concluded. “It’s time to end the forever war.” (President Trump’s favored phrase was “endless wars.”)

This sentiment may make for good politics, but it arguably reflects a misunderstanding of the commander-in-chief’s role in a time of war—and of America’s role in maintaining some semblance of international order. After all, 20 years in, the Cold War, like the war on terror, seemed like an “endless, forever war.” Indeed, it pays to recall that America has been engaged in “endless” missions in Germany since 1944, Japan since 1945, Korea since 1950, Kuwait since 1991, Kosovo since 1999.

Still, there’s something to be said about trying to make peace. Jesus taught us, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” As the Author of Life, He was trying in a new way to tell us an eternal truth: His greatest creation—His craftmanship, His masterpiece, His poiema—is made for peace, not war. Yet His word concedes that there’s “a time for war” and a place and purpose for the warrior in this world we have broken. High among those purposes, surely, are protecting the defenseless, maintaining order and standing in the way of evil—whether that evil is embodied by godless men depriving people of the right to worship or by mass-murderers masquerading as holy men demanding that people worship.

America’s military presence in Afghanistan was always related to those noble purposes of the warrior—protecting the American people from another attack conceived on Afghan territory, maintaining some semblance of international order there on the far fringes of civilization, and standing as a barrier between humanity and the evils of jihadism. As the late Christopher Hitchens wryly observed upon the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001, “The United States has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age… This deserves to be recognized as an achievement.” It’s an achievement of much greater worth than a peace deal that does nothing to achieve peace.

Of course, America’s military did more than topple the Taliban and crush its al-Qaeda guests. Given that the Taliban and al-Qaeda shared the same worldview and same enemy, the Bush administration concluded that sweeping the Taliban and al-Qaeda from power was not enough to protect America. So America’s military began to lay the foundations of a new Afghan government committed to fighting terrorists rather than harboring terrorists. This is why and how the small-footprint war of late 2001 morphed into a large-scale nation-building operation spanning two decades.

Importantly, the vast majority of the Afghan people didn’t view the US-led mission as an imperialist crusade. “Afghans have never seen you as occupiers,” former defense minister Abdul Rahim Wardak explains. “Unlike the Russians, who imposed a government with an alien ideology, you enabled us to write a democratic constitution and choose our own government. Unlike the Russians, who destroyed our country, you came to rebuild.”

One of the things America and its allies (some 50 countries had troops in Afghanistan) built for the Afghan people was a bridge back to civilization. Twenty years later, Afghanistan still has yet to make it across that bridge. As long as the Taliban is in power or in proximity to power, the forever-broken country never will.

That’s because the Taliban is today what it always has been: a vile enemy of civilization. The Taliban banished girls from school, ordered Hindus to wear identity labels, executed those belonging to opposing sects of Islam, turned soccer stadiums into mass-execution chambers, splashed acid onto teachers, used children to plant IEDs, and made common cause with Osama bin Laden’s death cult. Even as they talked peace, Taliban fighters targeted and nearly killed the US commander in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban have seized more than one-third of Afghanistan’s districts in recent weeks,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Half of Afghanistan’s provinces are under threat from Taliban takeover. Circling like vultures, Taliban leaders vow to “fight against the Afghan government and seize power by force.”

Remember

Those words bring us back to those images from Saigon. The consequences of April 1975 were not confined to Saigon and Southeast Asia. America’s withdrawal from South Vietnam ushered in a period of defeatism, decline, and self-doubt among the American people—and created an opportunity for our enemies. In Henry Kissinger’s view, “It is doubtful that Castro would have intervened in Angola, or the Soviet Union in Ethiopia, had America not been perceived to have collapsed in Indochina.”

US intelligence warns that the Afghan government could fall within six months after America withdraws. That may be a generous estimate. Whether it’s six months or six weeks, there will be geopolitical fallout for America and opportunities for our enemies—just as there were after Saigon.

And there will be terrible consequences for the people left behind. Though the Taliban didn’t care to observe the decent interval Ho Chi Minh’s henchmen observed after the Paris Peace Accords were signed—and though the Trump-Biden pullout lacks even the pretense or window dressing of peace the Paris Accords offered—the endpoint is the same: once the backstop support of America’s military is gone, our erstwhile allies are left to the tender mercies of our sworn enemies.

Our allies in Afghanistan—democratically elected leaders and civil servants, US-trained police and army, teachers and schoolkids, aid workers and moderate imams—will be subjected to all the Taliban’s dark arts: summary executions, mutilations, maimings, all manner of torture, the rollback of learning and light. Our enemies will be given, yet again, safe haven to plan and plot. The UN reports that “the Taliban continue to be the primary partner” for virtually every terrorist group operating in Afghanistan. According to the Pentagon, the “Taliban maintains close ties to al-Qaeda,” which has a presence in 21 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. ISIS, too, has set up shop in Taliban territory.

This is what worries men who have been fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and jihadism for 20 years—men like Gen. David Petraeus. Without the “means to pressure extremist networks,” Petraeus warns of “full-blown civil war and the re-establishment of a terrorist sanctuary” in Afghanistan. CENTCOM commander Gen. Frank McKenzie counters that there are plans “to go after al-Qaeda and ISIS from… other locations in the theater.” But Petraeus is not so sanguine about those plans or the pullout. “The cost of retaining a few thousand troops in Afghanistan pales in comparison with the price the nation will pay strategically and economically if al-Qaeda or ISIS rebuilds a terrorist platform there,” Petraeus argues.

He knows that history can indeed repeat itself—and he remembers what the Manhattan skyline looked like before the Taliban opened Afghan territory to al-Qaeda.