Lex Anteinternet: The peace treaty in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's flag.

So does anyone really believe that this will work?

Lex Anteinternet: The peace treaty in Afghanistan.:  Signing the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which allowed the US to pretend that it was leaving Vietnam with an honorable peace. The p...

I certainly don't believe that the Taliban will reform itself and observe this long term.  Wyoming Congressman Liz Cheney, who commented on it yesterday, doesn't believe it will work at all and publicly criticized it yesterday, to her credit.   The leadership of Afghanistan indicated it wouldn't honor the prisoner exchange, for which it can't be blamed, as it hadn't agreed to it.

Flag of the Syrian anti government forces.

It's hard not to be really cynical about this.

This arrangement working out will require the leopard to change its spots and a willingness on the US to go back into the country if it does not.  I don't see either of those things occurring.  It would also require the Afghan government, which has suffered far more causalities than we have, being willing to go along with an accord with the Taliban, which also seems quite unlikely.

Flag of the 1956 Hungarian revolutionaries.

And it can't help but be noted that this has the appearance of being a deal to end a war that comes months before a Presidential election and which features a timeline that will preclude it from failing before the election, which has a rather Nixonian feel to it.

Cambodian flag, 1970-75.

The United States has sustained 2,440 combat deaths in Afghanistan and the war has lasted twenty years, thanks to Donald Rumsfield's blundering tactics on the war in its initial stages.  2,440 lost lives is not inconsequential, but in normal historical terms its not the sort of bleeding that most wars entail.  The Vietnam War and Korean War were over twenty times as deadly.  Single days during World War One, One and World War Two were that bad and much worse.  Over 4,000 deaths occurred during the Philippine Insurrection, which in some ways is the war that's most comparable to the war in Afghanistan, and we don't ever remember that war, which was just about as long lasting.

Let's hope that those lives were not lost in vain.

Flag of the Republic of Vietnam.