Saigon 2.0: U.S. Helicopters Pull Personnel From Kabul Embassy Roof as Taliban Declares Victory

On August 16 the Taliban insurgent group regained control of the Afghan capital Kabul after almost 20 years in the hands of either U.S.-led coalition forces or the Western-backed Afghan government which was set up based on a Western liberal democratic political model. As the former rulers of Afghanistan, the Islamist Taliban, have made gains which appear to have taken the U.S. and their allies by surprise, with the U.S. embassy in Kabul effectively shut down on the 15th as Helicopters were deployed to ferry Americans to the nearby airport to be taken out of the country. This followed a statement by President Joe Biden adamantly denying the possibility that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would lead to helicopters evacuating people off the roof of the U.S. embassy - which was one of the most iconic images of the U.S. client government in South Vietnam falling in 1975. The fact that Chinook helicopters used for both withdrawals only strengthened the parallels between them, with this heavy transport having yet to be replaced since entering service in 1962. The fall of the Afghan government and that of South Vietnam have been widely compared, with both relying heavily on Western support for counterinsurgency efforts and having much larger and better armed forces than their adversaries, but ultimately collapsing due to low morale and a lack of popular legitimacy.