Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1489838
15 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 11 JANUARY 2023 OPINION 1971 which revealed the blun- ders and intelligence failures in Vietnam, the publication of the Afghanistan Papers by the Washington Post in December 2019 showed that the US lacked realistic objectives and a clear exit strategy in Afghanistan. They also revealed another sad parallel between the two con- flicts. Military and government officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations delib- erately misrepresented condi- tions in Afghanistan to appease an American public opinion suffering from war fatigue. Current president Joe Biden rejected any comparison be- tween his withdrawal from Af- ghanistan and the US retreat from Vietnam. His response was unequivocal: "None what- soever. Zero." Yet, it is im- possible to look at images of desperate Afghans running alongside a plane at what was then Hamid Karzai interna- tional airport on August 31 2021, and not compare them to the image of the US helicop- ter perched on an apartment building, loaded with evacuees, in Saigon in 1975. Meanwhile, 50 years on, Bid- en is making strengthening re- lations with Vietnam a key part of his foreign policy agenda for Asia, building on the dec- ades-long project of reconcil- iation. However, the lessons from the Vietnam war remain the prism through which US policymakers, media and pub- lic opinion often view armed conflicts. Mara Oliva is Associate Pro- fessor of History, University of Reading Above: Hovering U.S. Army helicopters pour machine gun fire into a tree line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese ground troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp 18 miles north of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, in March of 1965 Left: Initial carefully targeted strikes against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks turned into a 20-year-long war