It shouldn’t have happened this way. For the Kabul government to collapse and the Taliban to seize power in Afghanistan even before the completion of the U.S. and coalition military withdrawal did not make sense. This was only supposed to have occurred some months or even years after the withdrawal—according, at least, to what appeared to be the most relevant historical analogies: the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam began in January 1973 and was completed by the end of March 1973. Congress cut back (but did not cut off) the administration’s request for military assistance to Saigon in 1974. South Vietnam fell to the Marxists in April 1975 (as did Cambodia in the same month and Laos shortly thereafter). In other words, South Vietnam was able to survive for just over two years after the United States had completely withdrawn.
The USSR completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, but Mikhail Gorbachev continued providing military assistance to the country’s Marxist regime even after the 1989 collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Boris Yeltsin, though, ended Russian arms supplies shortly after the collapse of the USSR in December 1991. By the following April, Afghanistan’s Marxist regime had fallen to its mujahideen opponents. In this case, then, Moscow’s beleaguered ally was able to survive for over three years after the completion of the Soviet withdrawal.
